Aerial View

The town of Glenarm lies in a valley and is so named after the southernmost of the nine Glens of Antrim.  It claims to be the oldest town in Ulster; and with its views directly across the Irish Sea to the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, it is geographically at the heart of the ancient kingdom of Dalriada which linked Scotland and Ulster.  

There has been a castle at Glenarm since 1242 when Hugh de Lacy, the Norman Earl of Ulster, granted the Glens of Antrim to another Norman, John Bisset, who had previously lived in Scotland but was exiled after killing a cousin at a tournament.  John promised to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but instead went straight to Ireland and built a castle at Glenarm.  Generations later, an only daughter of the Bissets married into the MacDonnell clan, who still occupy the Castle today.

The original castle of Glenarm stood on the opposite side of the river to where it is sited today; but then, in the first half of the 17th century, the First Earl of Antrim built a “fine new house”, the first stage of the present castle, to the north side of the town.  It was probably a plain Irish Jacobean building with simple mullioned windows and a few embellishments. 

Only six years later, it was burned by an invading Scots Covenanter army that attacked the Royalist MacDonnells, and the castle remained a roofless ruin for 90 years.