Dungannon Charlemont Fort - a tourist attraction just outside Dungannon district, County Tyrone

In 1602 Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, built a fort on the co Armagh bank of the River Blackwater, which was subsequently enlarged and given the name of Charlemont from his own Christian name. A garrison of 150 men were place in the fort under the command of Captain Toby Caulfield.

Insided the fort was a charming little C17 governor's house, which resembled one of those hunting lodges built in the castle style in Elizabethan or Jacobean England; with symmetrical bows and clusters of chimneys rising like turrets from its four corners. This became the home of the Caulfeild family, who, when raised to the peerage, took the title of Charlemont. In the early morning of July 30 1920 a body of about 40 armed men attacked the house which was then occupied only by a caretaker. They burned the house and in 1921 the ruins were sold to a contractor who sold the bricks and stones for cheap building material.

The famous C18 'Volunteer' Earl of Charlemont lived mostly at Charlemont House and at Marino, the seat which he acquired just outside the capital; but some time in C18, a new house, called Roxborough, was built facing Charlemont Fort from the County Tyrone side of the river. This became the principal seat of the Volunteer Earl's descendants.

The gatehouse of the fort probably dates from the late 17th century. It had a drawbridge which is now gone, as is the ditch which it spanned. Some time in the late 18th century it seems to have received a makeover. It now looks like a Classical Georgian building with a pediment and a large panel with the Charlemont coat of arms over the gateway.

Inside the building much of the original stonework is intact but the floors are badly decayed. The pulleys associated with the drawbridge mechanism and the channels for the sliding counterweights are clearly visible. Portions of the outer earthen bank of the artillery fort still exist.

The fort remained a government building until the middle of the 19th century when it was acquired by the Charlemont Family. They do not seem to have done much with it, probably because they were concentrating on their large house, Roxborough Castle, just on the other side of the River Blackwater. This large house was built some time in the 18th century, probably by the 1st Earl of Charlemont. In the middle of the 19th century the 2nd and 3rd Earls carried out extensive renovations and rebuilding to produce a large French-style chateau. This house was burned about the same time as the house in Charlemont Fort. Only the elaborate 19th century gates and screen survive.

Roxborough Castle was a plain 5 bay block of 3 storeys over a high basement was enlarged and remodelled from 1842 onwards by 2nd Earl; his architect being William Murray. Wings were added of 1 bay and 2 storeys over a basement, running the full length of the original block; these were in Murray's rather restrained Italianate style; the original block being given triangular window pediments and similar features so as to match them. The entrance was moved round to the side of of one of these wings, which became the new entrance front; of 3 bays with a low portico.

At the other side of the house, a large office court was built; a feature of which was a row of 4 little octagons with pyramidal roofs, described in the plan as 'larders'. The entrance door under the portico opened into a hall at basement level, from which a flight of steps led to a vestibule in the main block of the house, with the staircase opening off it at one side. The space saved by moving the entrance to the wing enabled a new large drawing room to be formed in the original block; but the proportions of the other two principal rooms, the dining room and library, remained unchanged.

Some time in the C19 the rooms were adorned with chimneypieces and doors brought from Charlemont House in Dublin. Ca 1864, soon after the third earl inherited, the house was radically transformed by the young 'eclectic' architect William J Barre. Murray's wings were rebuilt on a much larger scale so that they became 3 storeys high and projected on either side of the original block. The ends of the wings were treated as corner towers or pavilions and given high Mansard roofs in the French chateau manner, crowned with decorative ironwork; but in a typically Victorian way, one of these roofs was made slightly different from the other 3.

The skyline was further enlivened with pointed and pinnacled dormers, tall chimneystacks with segmental caps, and a row of steep little pediments like saw teeth along the roof cornice. There were similar but larger pediments over the downstairs windows, some of them interlocking and with tympana containing carved heads representing members of the Charlemont family, their ancestors and several of the leading political personages of the day.

Barre's exterior ornamentation of his new wings defies description; his biographer, writing 1868, a year after his untimely death, describes it as 'the very extensive use of Classic and Gothic detail indiscrminately, an immediate connection with each other'. All this ornament was confined to the wings, the original block remaining much as Murray had left it; except for the addition of a porch, not centrally placed, on one of its fronts; the entrance having been moved here from the wing.

The whole effect was spectacular, if somewhat reminiscent of the Grand Hotel at a fashionable Victorian resort. Both Roxborough and Charlemont Fort were burnt in 1922.

Motorists passing through the village of Moy can stop in Charlemont at the junction to Portadown and see the cast-iron gate and screen set up in the 19th century to provide the grand entrance to the Castle. The richly modelled metalwork is thought by some to have been the work of the firm of the celebrated Dublin iron-founder Richard Turner, best known for his conservatories in Dublin, Belfast and Kew Gardens. 200 yards further along towards Armagh, right on the corner, one can still see the gates and ruins of the gate house to the Fort.

Charlemont Fort

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