Chris de Burgh

When I was a child, my father’s engineering job took my parents to Nigeria and what was then the Belgian Congo. My brother, Richard, and I went to boarding school; I was at Marlborough College, Richard at Stowe. My grandfather, General Sir Eric de Burgh, had retired to Ireland and, during the holidays, Richard and I stayed with him.

My father had often expressed this insane desire to live in a castle. There are lots in Ireland – most of them falling down. So, in 1960, as my parents and lots of others were leaving the Congo in a hurry on the eve of its independence, my grandfather bought a Norman castle for us.

We moved in when I was 12. I was so excited. The idea of living in a castle was romantic and dramatic – even though it had no light, heat, electricity, water or furniture. Bargy Castle is near Wexford, on the southeast coast of Ireland, two or three miles from the sea. The huge tower was built in the 12th century. The strategic way of communicating then was with fire or smoke, and from the top of our tower, you can see five others. Above the front door is the hole where boiling oil was poured over intruders, and there are, of course, arrow slits. At the back of the castle, there is a dry moat. The sea would once have come within a few hundred yards of the front.

My grandfather paid £7,500 for Bargy Castle. The previous owner was a market gardener who had kept birds in all the rooms. The place was a shambles; there had been turkeys in one room, pheasants in another. We had to pump water from a well. Twenty minutes of pumping got enough buckets of water for the day. It was a spartan lifestyle, but, being at an English boarding school, I knew all about that.

The place was wired within a year or so. We had open fires and, eventually, central heating. To furnish the place, my mum and dad went to auctions. They bought big pieces that nobody wanted, which were relatively cheap. They got tables for the banqueting hall and six four-poster beds. The castle was attached to a 170-acre farm, and we started as farmers, with cattle, sheep, corn and sugar beet. Richard and I had to muck in, particularly during the lambing season. We had early lambs in January and February, when it was bitterly cold, so we had to get up at night and run about in the frozen fields. We saw the back ends of more sheep than I care to remember.

Once the castle was more habitable, my grandfather moved in and my mum and dad decided to open a family hotel. We had accommodation for 50 people, and the season was from Easter to the end of September. My mother did the cooking and my father took care of the business side. Richard and I were baggage handlers and waiters. We organised riding, volleyball and cricket. In the evenings, because the local pub was a mile away and there was no television, I would pick up a guitar and start singing. It was a great way to meet girls. Before I ever stood on a professional stage, I’d done hundreds of living-room concerts for people from all over the world.

As the years went on, my father installed 18 bathrooms, which was quite something, because some of the exterior walls were 6ft thick. We had 12 bedrooms in the main house, an annexe with five bedrooms, three at the top of the tower, and a basement where the summer staff would sleep.

As a family, we had to move out of our rooms at the beginning of the season. We had a little cottage down the end of the lane where my mother decamped, and occasionally, I slept there too. Or I took a room at the top of the tower, which meant going up 70 spiral steps to bed. One year, I slept in a cow shed. People would wake me up in the morning by throwing rocks on the tin roof.

My father never thought he achieved much, but he was an amazing man who did a huge amount. He knocked through two arches in the banqueting hall to double the size of the room. He also built a drawbridge from the hall across the moat. At one end of the room was a pipe organ; at the other, two ornamental horse-drawn carriages. In the hall are a portrait of my grandfather and the de Burgh crest, which allegedly originated during one of the crusades. Richard Coeur de Lion is said to have dipped his finger in the blood of a slain Saracen king, put a red cross on the gold shield of a de Burgh, and said: “For your bravery, this will be your crest.”

My parents ran the castle as a hotel for 20 years. My dad is dead, but my mum still lives there. I love Bargy Castle. I started in my profession because of the opportunity it gave me, and I called my first album Far Beyond These Castle Walls. I go back as often as possible, and when I drive through the gates, it’s like stepping off the planet into a different world. Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet

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