6-8 High St, Antrim St, Carrickfergus BT38 7AF
Dobbins Inn Hotel, Carrickfergus.
Carrickfergus visitors ‘randy for antique’ usually head straight for the castle, but anyone wanting a whiff of history might equally well cross the street to Dobbin’s Inn Hotel, an Elizabethan tower house which comes complete with resident ghost. The building appears on a map dated 1576, and occupies the site of the castle founded by Stephen Dobbin (the name derives from an earl of D’Aubin), and in its varied history has served as an armoury, a barracks, a prison and a mail collection point for the early Post Office.
In Miskimmin’s History of Ireland, there is a 1622 mention of a James Dobbin who ‘though of ancient family, yet kept an inn and sold ales.’ To listen to an account of the discoveries made there in recent years is to see the veil of time partly lifted. In 1946 during a conversion, a huge early 16th century fireplace, a priest’s hole and a stairway to the eaves were discovered. One look at the fireplace today, with a waitress standing inside it dispensing coffee, will assure you that this has been the central fireplace in an Elizabethan castle great-hall.
Then in 1986 during a thorough renovation of the upstairs bedroom accommodation, a bricked up fireplace was discovered, in what had been a sealed-off passageway, and sitting there, as if today’s, was a collection of 18th century papers and documents, ready to light the fire. You can imagine the excitement among local historians and museum people.
They even discovered that the hairs among the papers were human hairs, combed into them by their readers and writers over two hundred years earlier. Some of these documents are still on display behind glass in the hotel, including one which was the scribbler or exercise book of a boy, Thomas Seeds, later to become a prominent person of the town. The same boy, Thomas Seed, is mentioned elsewhere as having been picked-up by a mounted French Lieutenant, delivered from the danger of the hooves of the troop of soldiers as they passed through the town, and returned to the safety of the inn.
The beams in the ceilings of todays coffee-room, reception area, and upstairs small conference room, are the original timbers, which experts say were probably taken from ships of the time, so you are looking at beams from the late 1500’s or early 1600’s, when you drink coffee at Dobbin’s
The conference room just mentioned is the former bedroom number 16, in which the fireplace and papers were discovered; it was decided to make it a kind of public showplace room, so that visitors could see for themselves this little slice of history.
By the way, that ghost mentioned at the beginning, is a benign female called Maud, who appears in the evenings and has been seen by staff and guests. Some locals claim she may have wandered over from the tunnel which is said to connect the Inn to the Castle. What can be said with certainty is that Gas Board workers carrying out a job, ascertained that there are excavations of one kind or another below street level, although whether these are a tunnel over to the castle or not is yet to be confirmed.
The public bar, the John Paul Jones bar, is worth a visit even if you don’t know anything about the history of the hotel building. It is named after the John Paul Jones who in 1778, in the bay guarded by Carrickfergus Castle, attacked and captured the British warship, DRAKE, thus registering the first ever American naval victory.
The whole bar has a distinctly nautical air about it; the centrepiece is the wheel of
The John Paul Jones bar, Dobbin’s Inn Hotel.
the PINTAIL which foundered off the Antrim coast in 1908. Her ship’s bell is also there. Around the walls are photos of all manner of ships, old and new; training ships, merchant ships aircraft carriers, submarines, and in there somehow or other, a helicopter and a killer whale! Most fascinating of all is the collection of sailors’ tallies, the hatbands worn on their caps to identify their ships. These number nearly a hundred, and quite a few have been donated by visitors. They are from many nations, and include one from the ARK ROYAL and one from the H.M.S. BELFAST, now a maritime museum on the Thames. You can see them decorating the showcase behind the bar.
Dobbin’s Inn Hotel would need a booklet all its own to do it justice. It would be worth while ‘foundering’ on the Antrim Coast to end up in such an intereting place.
The only American not born in American soil was an Irishman and he wasn’t born on Irish soil either. He was Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) whose father owned a tavern in North Gate, Carrickfergus. Young Andrew was born on a ship bound for America and not in South Carolina as he later claimed. The American constitution stipulates that all Presidents must be born in the United States, so he had to lie about his birth in order to remain eligible for the job.