Game of Thrones gives Northern Ireland’s Castle Ward a boost

Visitors are flocking to the 500-year-old doors of a key location in Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones has put a once forgotten estate in Northern Ireland back on the map. Picture: Supplied

In all its 500 years, Castle Ward has seen some disturbing things. There was the 18th-century viscount who went insane; there were the two IRA members killed in an explosion; and there was the predilection of the fifth Lord Bangor for collecting stuffed squirrels posed in boxing gloves.

Even so, the past decade has been particularly eventful, what with the incest, castration and numerous executions. But that’s what you should expect when you become one of the prime locations for Game of Thrones. If nothing else, it has done wonders for visitor numbers to the National Trust property in Co Down.

“Before, if we had people from five or ten countries we would have thought we were doing well,” Shirley Millar, who is organising a Game of Thrones festival at the castle, said.

All that has changed since the oldest section of the estate was used as the location for Winterfell, seat of one of the warring families in Game of Thrones, whose final episode of the seventh series is broadcast in the UK tonight.

Now, she reckons, “we have visitors from more than 64 countries. The other morning I came in and there was a camper van with three German guys in it and the only thing they were interested in is, ‘Where’s Winterfell?’ ”

Northern Ireland has become an important location for the adaptation of George RR Martin’s fantasy books. So valuable is the series to the economy that the tourist board has a section of its website dedicated to it.

Initially Ms Millar said that she did not pay it much attention but these days many of the staff are themselves “thronies”, as she puts it.

Next month the house will recreate a Game of Thrones tournament. Ms Millar said that the staff “had a discussion” about whether the historic home of the Ward family should embrace a connection with a series famed for brutal violence, but any fears were dismissed.

“We see this as part of the modern story of Castle Ward,” she said.

Winterfell Festival will be held at the castle on September 24.

The Times