There aren’t many country houses that have played host to the Queen, a clutch of US presidents, the Dalai Lama, politicians such as Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, and the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
But Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland is no ordinary historic mansion. This Georgian building, tucked away behind a town square in the small village of Hillsborough, near Lisburn in County Down, is a royal residence, a government office (home to the secretary of state for Northern Ireland) and, since July, a new historic attraction that will entertain an estimated 200,000 visitors a year.
Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), the charitable organisation that runs Hillsborough Castle alongside the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace, and Kew Palace, all in London, is spending £16m on an ambitious makeover.
A recent extensive internal refurbishment has upgraded the property with 21st-century facilities, and new additions will open in April 2019, including a Clore learning centre, shop, cafe and car park, as well as the venue’s own slip road off the main arterial route from Dublin to Belfast. The restoration of the four-acre walled garden, overseen by the awarding-winning gardener Adam Ferguson, will also open next April.
The idea, according to Patricia Corbett, the head of Hillsborough Castle, is to “open this asset to the people of Northern Ireland – to give it back, if you like”. Previously, only those members of the public invited to a royal garden party would have been able to look inside the wrought-iron gates.
There is a huge amount of work under way to make Hillsborough Castle a successful tourist attraction, according to the local council, which also plans to invest in a £5m revamp of the surrounding village and its forest park.
Peter Hain, a former Northern Ireland secretary, said the property had to combine the functions of a family home, political negotiating space and venue for royal visits and political summits. One of the challenges in the grand refurbishment was that it has had to be done while the building continued to function in all these roles.
The challenges for HRP are not just physical either. It also has to address the fact that in Northern Ireland a “royal” residence – a seat of historic imperialism – can be deeply divisive. In Ireland, landowners, many of whom were domiciled in England, controlled vast tracts of land worked by the native Irish.
The tensions between landlords and tenants spilled into British politics and resulted in a series of controversial land acts, transferring ownership to tenant farmers. Although land ownership in Northern Ireland was slightly different, animosity grew between the mainly landless Catholic Irish and Protestant farmers.
Hillsborough Castle, like many of its counterparts, was built in the latter half of the 18th century. It was created by Wills Hill, who was later ennobled as the first Marquess of Downshire. Hill was secretary of state for the colonies and a rival to his fellow Irishman, the foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, who lived at nearby Mount Stewart (now open to the public under the National Trust), also in County Down.

Tackling preconceptions
“It’s a modest house,” says Shan McAnena, the creative programming and interpretation manager at Hillsborough Castle. “It doesn’t have a major collection and, even when it was the seat of Northern Ireland’s governors between 1924 and 1973 they had to bring in their own furniture.”
A fire in 1934 meant little of the original fixtures and fittings survived, and over the years it has been extensively patched up. “As a government building with only limited access to the public, make do and mend was the order of the day,” McAnena says. “It became a cross between a tired looking embassy and a country house hotel.”
The new decorative scheme is 21st century, she says, but is informed by the history of the house. For example, the walls of the large drawing room are now lined in handcrafted silk from Suffolk, in homage to the original wallpaper. And, as a royal palace, Hillsborough Castle will have access to the vast number of artworks held by the Royal Collection, the 500-year-old art collection amassed by British royalty.
The castle’s windows will, however, retain the bulletproof glass first introduced in the 1970s during the Troubles. And to help tell the story of the conflict, there will be photographs on display of the talks that were hosted at the house that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, including one of the BBC reporters Jeremy Paxman and John -Humphries bouncing delightedly on the Queen’s bed. 
There are no ropes or interpretation boards in the castle. Instead, “explainers” will use the contents of the house to tell the story to visitors. “We don’t shy away from things like the role of landlordism in Ireland or the Irish famine of the late 1840s,” says McAnena.
But it is the recent story of the castle that will provide more of the focus. “History hasn’t stopped happening here,” she adds, pointing out that Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland secretary during the Tony Blair government, used it to host parties for the protagonists of the Troubles. “Hillsborough Castle was at the heart of attempts to resolve the conflict.”
HRP is spending more than £1.8m of its £5m Heritage Lottery Fund grant on an ambitious engagement programme, including an oral-history project aimed at locating the personal stories of those involved in the historically important events at the house, as well as those who have worked there.
An ongoing two-year programme called How Do We? involves discussions with more than 40 groups across Northern Ireland about the stories they would like to see explored in the castle. Another more intensive strand of the consultation, titled Thresholds, will take Hillsborough Castle’s story to other “contested spaces”, including Protestant Orange Order lodges and mosques to debate what the house can or should mean to different communities.
A pop-up castle involving actors and filmed sequences will take the castle’s story on the road to arts festivals and Belfast’s annual Pride event in 2019. Community-access schemes will involve tours and talks for local groups, and the village will work with artists and writers to create a permanent artwork in the castle grounds.

“Participation and engagement is the most important part of what HRP is seeking to do in all its properties,” says Ciara Hickey, the learning partner for adults and communities at HRP. “But elsewhere, there isn’t the same raw tension and symbolism that you find here in Northern Ireland. Rather than pretending it’s not there, it’s important that we face it. Instead of whitewashing the history of Hillsborough Castle, there is a need to go into it.
“We want to tackle any preconceptions head-on – for example, from the Catholic and Nationalist community about the exclusivity of a royal residence and its association with the royal family – and instead emphasise its role in peace negotiations.”

Courting controversy
Hugh Maguire, a heritage consultant and former director of the Hunt Museum in Limerick in the Republic of Ireland, is sceptical about Hillsborough Castle’s approach. “It’s a country house,” he says. “To suggest it is a royal palace is a fallacy. The seat of the monarchy in Ireland for 800 years was Dublin Castle.”

Attempting to give the house a royal patina by “digging out the dregs of furniture from the basement in Windsor Castle is simply myth-making”, he adds.
Maguire also points out that there is no attempt to place the castle in its context: the surrounding area has been home to a huge army barracks since 1940 – what he describes as “the massive military -infrastructure needed to keep the country quiet and subdued”.
He adds: “Where the issues are still alive, it seems they can’t be mentioned. I am not  suggesting that you make visitors miserable with all this, but a few lines about the social upheaval that marked the erection of these houses would not go amiss.”
Indeed, another awkward bit of history surfaced when the National Trust embarked on a revamp of its flagship property in Northern Ireland, Mount Stewart. It was owned by the Marquess of Londonderry until it was given to the trust in 1977, and was looking “a bit dismal and jaded”, according to the house’s lead curator, Frances Bailey. A major facelift in 2015 boosted visitor numbers from 35,000 to 80,000 a year.
Political controversy is tackled in the revamped property – there is no attempt to hide the ceramic figure of a Nazi storm trooper that stands on a mantelpiece, for example.
It was a gift from the Nazi leader Hermann Göring in recognition of the seventh Marquess of Londonderry Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart’s role in mediating a series of one-to-one talks with Göring and Hitler, which attempted to reach a peace agreement between Great Britain and Germany’s Third Reich before the second world war. (In reportage at the time, the marquess was unfairly painted as a Nazi sympathiser and nicknamed the Londonderry Herr.)
But the inspiration for the refurbishment came from his wife, Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the seventh Marchioness of Londonderry, who lived in the house from to 1921 until her death in 2009.
She was a suffragist and noted orator, as well as the wife of a high-profile politician – her husband Charles was the aviation minister in the national government in the 1930s. One of the principles that informed the revamp at Mount Stewart was to make it a place of debate and discussion once again.
“Charles and Edith Londonderry would invite all sorts of people to Mount Stewart and maintained an extensive social and political life here and at their London residence, Londonderry House,” Bailey says. “It was important that we didn’t attempt to turn the clock back, but instead breathe new life into the place and make it feel like a country house that was also a home, rather than a public historic house.”
The National Trust celebrates this aspect of the house’s history with Mount Stewart Conversations, a festival (14-15 October) where eminent speakers will discuss important topics of interest. The house will also host an exhibition titled Faces of Change: Votes for Women (9 November 2018-3 February 2019), in collaboration with London’s National Portrait Gallery, which will feature women associated with the suffrage movement. 
But any reference to the marquess’s political role in Northern Ireland in the 1920s (he was education minister and a notable moderate in the conflict between Unionism and Nationalism) is absent in Mount Stewart’s interpretation. As is any discussion of the tensions of land ownership that marked the Victorian era across the whole of Ireland. “There’s not so much about the 19th century,” says Bailey, “because there are so many other stories to tell.”
The trust has to do much more to overcome barriers to access caused by perceptions of country houses, says Bailey, but she suggests the old idea of the National Trust as “all about green wellies and upper-class snobbery” is vanishing.
Terence Dooley is the director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, in the Republic of Ireland.
He says there has been a transformation in attitudes in Ireland since the days when the “big house” was a target for Republicans – hundreds of country houses were attacked during the fight for Irish independence between 1919 and 1921, and they subsequently suffered from decades of neglect and decline.
But changes in education over the 1980s and 1990s meant that history in Irish schools and in third-level education challenged the old orthodoxies about the Irish country house and what they meant to local communities.
“Now, most universities in Ireland have a course devoted to the Irish country house in some shape or form,” Dooley says, adding that a new generation of owners have opened up archives and pioneered new approaches to interpretation. The situation in Northern Ireland is different, though, he adds, because the violence of the Troubles is not a distant memory but a recent political fact, and there is still some fear about facing such difficult issues.
Hillsborough Castle’s investment in those “difficult issues” may help to dispel that fear. So far, it is only at the beginning of its consultation programme. It will be intriguing to see what difference it makes.

Patrick Kelly is a freelance journalist.

There is a session on interpreting historic houses in Northern Ireland at the Museums Association Conference & Exhibition, 8-10 November, in Belfast