Hillsborough Fort

Hillsborough Fort in Royal Hillsborough, County Down, is a mid-17th-century artillery fort on the site of an Early Christian rath and an earlier Magennis stronghold. Colonel Arthur Hill built it about 1650 to command the main road from Dublin to Belfast and Carrickfergus. It was the first Hill residence and gave the village its name. In December 1660 Charles II made it a royal garrison and granted Arthur Hill the hereditary office of Constable, with a guard of warders.

The stone enclosure is about 270 feet square, with spear-shaped bastions at the four corners and earthen banks inside the walls. In the mid-18th century Wills Hill, later 1st Marquess of Downshire, had the engineer Christopher Myers recast it as a picturesque Gothick pleasure ground: turrets on the bastions, new gates, and a two-storey gatehouse with battlements, corner towers, and hood-moulded opening …