- The Old Darnley Lodge Hotel/Sale of Athboy
The Darnley Lodge Hotel was the estate office for the Darnley Family who owned the town of Athboy and surrounding land from 1770. The family had an enormous influence on the development of Athboy.
In 1694, the town’s ‘lands and commons’ and several other denominations of land were erected into a manor and granted to Thomas Bligh. His son, John, was created Earl of Darnley in 1725 and the Blighs (Earls of Darnley) were landlords of all but six of the 27 townlands in the parish of Athboy throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
The 3rd Earl of Darnley, an eccentric bachelor, who suffered from the delusion that he was a teapot. In 1766, when he was nearly fifty and had held the family title and estates for nearly twenty years, the Earl of Darnley suddenly and unexpectedly married; and between 1766 and his death in 1781 he fathered at least seven children, in spite of his initial alarm that his spout would come off in the night!
In 1900, following the deaths of his father and brother in quick succession, Ivo Bligh became the 8th Earl of Darnley. In 1882, Bligh led the English cricket team on a quest to “recover” the ashes of English cricket from Australia in the competition that would eventually become known as “The Ashes”.
To ease the estate’s financial woes, the 8th Earl sold the demesne at Clifton Lodge and his lands around Athboy before deciding to sell the ground rents of the town for “whatever price may be realised”. The people of Athboy organised themselves into a local chapter of The Town Tennants League and were successful in purchasing their properties from the estate at auction in Dublin in June 1909.
Athboy 100 