Castlewellan Forest Park

Castlewellan Forest Park lies on the edge of Castlewellan town in County Down, Northern Ireland. It covers 460 hectares of woodland and a 40-hectare lake, opened to the public in 1967 after the Forest Service bought the land from the Annesley family. The park contains the Castlewellan Arboretum & Annesley Garden, the Peace Maze and Castlewellan Castle. The arboretum started in 1740 as a 12½-acre walled garden and now stretches to 120 acres. It holds one of Europe’s finest tree collections, with over 700 taxa including thirty champion trees. The arboretum’s history includes planting by Hugh Annesley, 5th Earl Annesley, and his head gardener who introduced more than 1,800 species. Giant sequoias were added in the 1850s and still shelter treecreepers in their bark. Restoration work between 2012 and 2014 repaired greenhouses and the Moorish Tower, followed by a £5.5 million project in 2021 to restore the courtyard. The five-hectare walled garden has formal paths, ornamental fountains and rare trees such as the original Castlewellan Gold Leylandii and the handkerchief tree. The Peace Maze, built between 2000 and 2001 with 6,000 yew trees by volunteers, once held the world record for the longest hedge maze. Castlewellan Castle, built between 1856 and 1858 by the 4th Earl Annesley with architect William Burn, overlooks the lake on the site of an old church. The castle became a Christian conference centre in 1974 after standing empty for a decade. Nearby, the national Arboretum of Northern Ireland contains trees from Asia, Australasia and the Americas, including a Giant sequoia with nineteen trunks that won Northern Ireland’s Tree of the Year in 2018.