Discover Trim

The castle in the middle of a Meath market town

Hugh de Lacy was granted the Kingdom of Meath after the Norman invasion and put a fortress on the ridge above the Boyne at Trim. What replaced it, begun in the 1170s and finished by his son, is the largest Anglo-Norman castle in Ireland: a curtain wall and ditch enclosing about three acres, with a twenty-sided cruciform keep at the centre that has no exact parallel anywhere. The future Henry V was held here as a boy. The castle was considered as a seat for the Irish Parliament. In 1994 it stood in for a set of Scottish and English castles in Braveheart, which is still the connection most first-time visitors arrive with. The grounds are free and open; the keep is guided-access only, and the tour ends on the wall-walk with the whole valley in front of you.

The rest of the medieval town is not gathered into a heritage quarter, which is why it takes a walk to find. The Yellow Steeple, the broken bell tower of St Mary's Augustinian Abbey, stands on the ridge across the river and is visible for kilometres. The Sheep Gate, the only surviving gate of the walled town, sits free in a meadow with no ticket and no barrier. Between them and the Newtown ruins a mile downriver run the Porchfields, a medieval open field system that survived into the present because it flooded and so was never built on. The walk out along the Boyne, past the panels and benches Meath County Council has set along it, is the thing Trim people actually do. Two weekends change the town completely: the Royal Meath Show in the Porchfields on the first Sunday of September, and Púca at the end of October, when the keep becomes a projection surface.