Qualla: Trim, County Meath

Trim, County Meath: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. If you have seen Braveheart - the scene where Robert the Bruce broods on castle battlements, the long shot of the medieval English fortress at York - you have seen Trim Castle. Mel Gibson's crew put up Scottish saltires on the towers and called it England. The real place is a square keep of grey limestone on the south bank of the Boyne in County Meath, built by Hugh de Lacy in the 1170s, and it is the largest Norman castle in Ireland. The town that grew up beneath it is 9,500 people now, and it has been winning the national Tidy Towns competition since 1972.

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trim, County Meath: The Lord of Meath

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 2ManyCats4Me, CC0. When Henry II of England granted the lordship of Meath to Hugh de Lacy in 1172, he was handing one of his most ambitious barons a kingdom in everything but name. De Lacy and his son Walter spent the next half-century building Trim Castle into a statement of power. The keep is unl...

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Image: 2ManyCats4Me | CC0

Trim, County Meath: Wellington's Town

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charles Jervas, Public domain. Arthur Wellesley - the future Duke of Wellington, the man who would defeat Napoleon at Waterloo - is reputed to have been born at Dangan Castle, a few miles from Trim, in 1769. He spent some of his childhood here, and from 1790 to 1797 he sat as MP for Trim in the Irish Parliamen...

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Image: Charles Jervas | Public domain

Trim, County Meath: Burnings and Rebuildings

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. Trim has been burned more than once. In 1649, after Cromwell sacked Drogheda 30 miles east, the garrison here fled and the New Model Army moved in. In September 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, the local IRA company took the RIC barracks and burned it down. The Black a...

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trim, County Meath: Yellow Steeples and Black Friaries

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. The castle is the obvious thing, but Trim is layered with medieval ruin. The Yellow Steeple, named for the way the setting sun warms its stone, rises on a hillside opposite the castle - it is all that remains of fourteenth-century St Mary's Abbey, and it is still the tallest buil...

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trim, County Meath: Hay, Cars and the Halloween Fire

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John M, CC BY-SA 2.0. Modern Trim takes its history out of its display cases once a year. The Trim Haymaking Festival on the third Sunday of June brings out scythes and horse-drawn machinery to cut the year's first hay by hand in the Porchfields by the river. The Royal Meath Show in September has been...

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Image: John M | CC BY-SA 2.0