Qualla: Audley's Castle

Audley's Castle: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. It is barely a castle. Three storeys, one room on each floor, a thin enclosing wall around a small yard, and the whole thing set on a rocky knob a mile north-east of Strangford village, where the land tips down toward the lough. There are thousands like it scattered across the Irish countryside. That is the point of Audley's Castle, and also the surprise of it. Half a millennium after John Audley's family put their name on the place, an HBO production company stood a camera on the rocks below and used the tower as a backdrop for Robb Stark's camp, where the young King in the North met a woman called Talisa Maegyr and walked, without knowing it, into the rest of his life.

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Image: John Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Audley's Castle: The Architecture of the Lesser Lord

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irishdeltaforce, CC BY-SA 3.0. Towers like Audley's were not built for the great aristocracy. They were the architecture of lesser lords and gentry, the people who could afford stone but not splendour. Most went up between 1350 and 1550, and Audley's is from the tail end of that period, the late fifteenth cent...

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Image: Irishdeltaforce | CC BY-SA 3.0

Audley's Castle: The Audley Family

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. John Audley, whose name the castle still wears, was its sixteenth-century owner. The Audleys had been in Ireland since the early thirteenth century, part of the Anglo-Norman tide that came across with John de Courcy and put down roots along the eastern coast. By the time the towe...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

Audley's Castle: Audley's Field

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Des Colhoun, CC BY-SA 2.0. Game of Thrones used Audley's Castle twice, both times in the early seasons. The tower itself stood in as a backdrop for Robb Stark's army camp, and Audley's Field, the rough pasture below the rocks, was where Robb meets Talisa Maegyr in the aftermath of the Battle of Oxcross, th...

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Image: Des Colhoun | CC BY-SA 2.0

Audley's Castle: What's Inside

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Des Colhoun, CC BY-SA 2.0. If you climb up through the tower, the upper rooms still show what they were for. The second floor was the lord's private chamber, with the better windows facing into the lough. The garderobe shaft, the medieval latrine, drops straight down inside the wall to the base of the buil...

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Image: Des Colhoun | CC BY-SA 2.0