Qualla: Castlewellan Forest Park

Castlewellan Forest Park: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ryan Mcdonald, CC BY 2.0. Somewhere in the walled garden at Castlewellan, around 1962, the park's director John Keown noticed an unusual tree - a mutant Monterey cypress with golden-yellow foliage, denser and more compact than the species had any right to be. He propagated it. He named it 'Keownii.' Within a generation, that single mutant tree had become the parent of the Castlewellan Gold Leyland cypress, one of the most planted hedging conifers in northern Europe. If you have ever cursed a Leylandii hedge that was supposed to give you privacy and turned into a thirty-foot wall, the genetic line traces back to a tree growing in a 460-hectare County Down forest park at the foot of the Mournes.

Read more: Castlewellan Forest Park on Qualla

Image: Ryan Mcdonald | CC BY 2.0

Castlewellan Forest Park: The Annesley Project

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Annesleys arrived in this corner of County Down in the early eighteenth century and started planting in 1740 - the year considered the foundation of the arboretum. Hugh Annesley, 5th Earl Annesley, who inherited in 1874, was the great expander. With his head gardener he assem...

Read more: Castlewellan Forest Park on Qualla

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castlewellan Forest Park: The Sequoias of 1856

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HENRY CLARK, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1853 the English plant collector William Lobb returned from California with a haul of seeds collected from the great Sierra Nevada giant sequoias - Sequoiadendron giganteum - the largest trees on Earth. Lobb sold his seeds to the Veitch nursery in Exeter; saplings were grown o...

Read more: Castlewellan Forest Park on Qualla

Image: HENRY CLARK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castlewellan Forest Park: Castle and Castle Builder

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Standing close to the entrance of the arboretum, overlooking Castlewellan Lake, is Castlewellan Castle - a Scottish baronial pile of locally quarried granite built between 1856 and 1858. The architect was the Scotsman William Burn, then near the end of a long career as the leadin...

Read more: Castlewellan Forest Park on Qualla

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castlewellan Forest Park: The Peace Maze

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Albert Bridge, CC BY-SA 2.0. Between 2000 and 2001, in the years after the Good Friday Agreement, 6,000 yew trees were planted at Castlewellan to form a maze. The yews were planted by volunteers drawn from across Northern Ireland - Catholic and Protestant, unionist and nationalist - in a symbolic act of buil...

Read more: Castlewellan Forest Park on Qualla

Image: Albert Bridge | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castlewellan Forest Park: The Walled Garden

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. At the centre of the arboretum, the original twelve-and-a-half acre walled garden of 1740 still functions as it was designed to function - protected from the worst of the County Down weather by high stone walls, drained by the same gravity-fed system, planted with formal paths an...

Read more: Castlewellan Forest Park on Qualla

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castlewellan Forest Park: Lake, Bark and Distance

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martyn Pattison, CC BY-SA 2.0. The park covers 460 hectares, with a 40-hectare lake reflecting the castle and the encircling forest. The Mourne Mountains rise to the south, granite peaks that gave the castle its building stone. Beyond the lake, paths wind through plantings of trees from Asia, Australasia, Nort...

Read more: Castlewellan Forest Park on Qualla

Image: Martyn Pattison | CC BY-SA 2.0