placenamesKilwaughter
Cill Uachtair
Kilwaughter Castle links a seventeenth-century Agnew tower house with John Nash’s country-house designs and a later community campaign to preserve its ruins.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Cill Uachtair · Irish · main form · validated name
- Kilwaughter · English · main form
Place & story
From tower house to country residence
Kilwaughter Castle incorporates a four-storey tower house built for Patrick Agnew around 1622. Its projecting corner turrets survive within the later building. In the early nineteenth century Edward Jones Agnew commissioned John Nash to extend the residence. Further changes included an octagonal tower and a glass-roofed library, giving the old fortified house a much larger domestic setting. [2]
Bessie Smith’s letters
American tenant Elizabeth, known as Bessie, Bringhurst Smith altered the castle’s interiors during her long lease. The restoration group records that she remained there throughout the First World War and wrote nearly seven hundred letters home to America. Her correspondence offers a different way of understanding the house: through the experience of someone who lived there, alongside the architectural evidence preserved in the ruins. [2]
Military use and a roofless shell
The castle was requisitioned during the Second World War and used as an American Army transit camp. After the war its fittings were stripped and it was left without a roof. The official Heritage at Risk record dates its entry onto the register to 2003. Its account describes a building whose later deterioration followed the loss of the protective roof and the end of residential use. [3]
A local preservation campaign
Kilwaughter Castle Restoration Group formed in September 2015 to help prevent further loss of the building. Its plans included preserving the ruins and making the castle’s records and collections better known. From September 2016 the group also received advice and workshops through the Prince’s Regeneration Trust’s BRICK programme. [2]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Antrim
- Barony
- Glenarm Upper
- Civil parish
- Kilwaughter
- Coordinates
- 54.82955, -5.89896 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 1411652 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Kilwaughter. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- About Kilwaughter Castle and the restoration group · Kilwaughter Castle Restoration Group
- Kilwaughter Castle, Heritage at Risk record 520, HB 06/07/003 · Department for Communities, Northern Ireland
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2021-05-26. How this page was prepared.