The story of Antrim Round Tower
A monastery was founded here around 495 AD, one of the earliest Christian communities in Ulster, just a generation or two after St Patrick. Tradition links its founding to St Aedh, with a strong connection to the great monastery at Bangor and its founder St Comgall. For centuries this was a working religious settlement, and the round tower was its bell-tower, calling the community to prayer.
The tower itself was built around the 10th to 11th century from local basalt, standing 28 metres tall. Its doorway was set roughly 6.5 metres off the ground and reached by a ladder that could be hauled up, giving the monks a refuge as well as a belfry when raiders threatened. The Irish word for these structures, cloigtheach, means bell-house.
The monastery did not escape the violence of the age. The annals record it being plundered by Vikings in 1018 and burned again in 1147. After the Normans arrived in the 13th century its religious importance faded, and by the later medieval period the settlement had dwindled. The tower outlasted everything else built here.
Today the tower is the only upstanding survivor of that monastery, cared for as a state heritage monument. Around it, archaeologists have traced souterrains, stone houses, a cobbled road and field systems beneath the parkland. The Witch's Stone at its base, a hollowed bullaun stone, carries its own folk legend, and a cross still marks the conical cap a thousand years on.