Located in Clones, County Monaghan, Hilton Park has been home to the Madden family for almost 300 years. The 8th generation, Johnny and Lucy, are the welcoming hosts of Hilton Park today and have earned a reputation for warm, award winning hospitality and culinary excellence. They are now joined by the 9th generation, Fred and Joanna, whose youth and enthusiasm is reinvigorating the castle and the estate.

Hilton Park is magically situated on a 240 hectare private estate far from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. On the south side, the windows all give out over the parterre and the plains of the pleasure grounds to Hilton Lough, with its canal and Lovers’ Walk. Johnny and Lucy renovated the pleasure grounds and the rose garden in 1994 and replanted the parterre, which had been laid out by Ninian Niven in 1870.

The grounds contain the old Victorian kitchen garden, three squares comprising more than a hectare bounded by a mixture of red brick wall or water. These were made in the 1870s when Niven cleared away the much older walled garden, which hid the lake from the house. Hilton is also famous for its very tall oaks, planted in 1752 to commemorate the marriage of an ancestor and Anne Cope, who brought acorns from her family home at Loughgall, where similar trees can be seen to this day. Near the lake stand two mighty beeches, one of which was a county champion and the other the national champion in the millennium measuring.