Discover Slane

An estate village, a hill and a river crossing

Slane grew up where the Dublin road crossed the Boyne, under the Hill where the Fleming barons built their motte in the twelfth century and later a Franciscan friary and college. The Flemings lost the land in the Williamite confiscations, and the Conynghams bought the estate in 1703. What you walk through now is largely their eighteenth-century village: the Square with its four corner houses, Main Street and Chapel Street running off it, the mill down by the river, and the castle itself, rebuilt from 1785 to designs by Gandon, Wyatt and Francis Johnston, behind its walls to the west. The story that George IV had the Dublin road straightened to reach Lady Conyngham faster is one the Boyne Valley's own tourism board still repeats.

The castle is a private family home and opens by appointment, and the concerts are a handful of nights in a decade, so for most of the year the public Slane is smaller: the Hill of Slane, free and open, with the 1512 friary tower on top; the Francis Ledwidge Museum in the poet's birthplace cottage at Janeville; the distillery in the castle's old stables; and the Boyne, which runs under the bridge on its way to Newgrange and Drogheda. Newgrange is close, but it is reached only through the visitor centre at Donore, never by driving to the mound.