The Treasure Hunt in Tollymore Nobody Told You About

In 1719, the Earls of Clanbrassil began reshaping the landscape around the River Shimna (An tSiomha — ‘the river of rushes’) into something extraordinary. Over the next eighty years, they commissioned ornamental bridges, follies, gatehouses, and viewing platforms that turned a stretch of river valley at the foot of the Mourne Mountains into one of the finest designed landscapes in Ireland.

They brought in Thomas Wright of Durham — astronomer, architect, and one of the most original minds of the 18th century — to design the follies. Wright was the man who first proposed that the Milky Way was a disc-shaped structure. Between stargazing, he designed garden buildings across Britain and Ireland. His work at Tollymore (Tulaigh Mór — ‘the great hillock’) was among his finest.

The bridges were built across more than a century, each one reflecting the taste and ambition of whoever held the estate at the time. The Old Bridge (1726) came first — plain, elegant, and quietly confident. Then Ivy Bridge (1780), half-hidden beneath trailing ivy and overhanging trees, deliberately designed to look like a ruin even when it was new. The 18th century loved a romantic ruin.

Foley’s Bridge (1787) is the one most people photograph without knowing its name — a single arch over a stretch of the Shimna where the river pools dark and still beneath the canopy. It’s the bridge that Game of Thrones location scouts noticed when they chose Tollymore as the Haunted Forest. The atmosphere around it is extraordinary: the sound of water, the cathedral-like tree cover, the sense that you’ve stepped out of the 21st century entirely.

The last bridge, Parnell Bridge (1842), arrived after the Roden family had taken over the estate. By then, the age of grand follies was fading, but the instinct to build something beautiful over moving water endured.

The most remarkable structure in Tollymore isn’t a bridge at all. The Hermitage was built in the 1770s on a rocky outcrop overlooking the River Shimna — a small stone building designed as a place of contemplation, built in memory of a friend. It perches above the river, half-hidden by trees, and the sound of water below fills the space. The Clanbrassils didn’t build it for show. They built it for grief, and for quiet.

The Barbican Gate is the first thing you see — a gothic archway that marks the entrance to the park like a castle gatehouse. It was designed to set the tone: you are not entering a forest, you are entering an estate with pretensions. Everything beyond it was meant to surprise, from the bridges to the follies to the carefully framed views of the Mourne peaks above the treeline.