For over 400 years, the castle tower house guarded the coast at the mouth of the Shimna River. The last occupant was the Commander of the Revenue Service in South Down, Captain Francis Charles Annesley RN. After his death in August 1832, his brother, William Richard, 3rd Earl Annesley (1772–1838), decided to demolish the castle and build a marine hotel. It was part of his plan to turn Newcastle into an upmarket seaside resort.
The Newry Telegraph of Friday 7 November 1834 stated that “the new Inn in Newcastle is nearly completed and will be fit for reception of families in the ensuing Spring. It will be found a most commodious and well-built house, and contains 6 sitting rooms, 9 bedrooms, besides a good understory, and would be let with two sets of ladies’ baths, and two sets of gentlemen’s baths, stabling for 13 horses, coach house, a garden and an acre of ground adjoining.”
The stables mentioned now house Joyland Amusements. The current promenade area was laid out as the ‘marine gardens’ of the new ‘Newcastle Hotel’, which opened in June 1835 under the management of brothers Alexander and Robert Rule.
Logic suggests that, as the tower house and its outbuildings were being dismantled, the stone was reused to build the ‘Newcastle Hotel’ and the ‘Annesley Villa’. A comparison of the first Ordnance Survey map (early 1830s) with the second OS map (1850s) lets us work out the position of the tower house. It stood on the plaza in front of what is now the Newcastle Centre, roughly where the war memorial is now. In October 1931, council workmen discovered remains of a tunnel leading from the site of the former castle towards the mountains.
What we now know as the ‘Newcastle Centre’ was originally two separate buildings. Looking at it from the road, the lefthand side, where the tourist office is, was called the ‘Annesley Villa’. It had a Georgian-style doorway. The larger hotel building to the right was (and still is) a symmetrical building with a protruding porch. Both buildings had corner quoins, currently painted blue.
By 1860, these original two buildings were joined by inserting an additional section, making one long building that became known as the ‘Annesley Arms Hotel’. Newspaper accounts reported that “the entire range of premises hitherto known as the ‘hotel buildings’ have been converted into one house, and will be opened on Saturday the 7th July (1860) as the ‘Annesley Arms’.” This is the long building we still see today.
