THE HOUSE AND ESTATE
The Cleggan Shoot, one of the best sporting shoots in Northern Ireland, is situated in the North Antrim Hills above the Glens of Antrim, which face the great Scottish peninsular, The Mull of Kintyre.
Cleggan Lodge was built by Earl O’Neill in 1822 to keep one of his mistresses and as a shooting lodge on the edge of his extensive grouse moors in North Antrim. He died without a male heir and after Gladstone’s Irish Land Acts the great Irish estates diminished.
In 1927, Sir Hugh O’Neill, the 1st Lord Rathcavan, bought the Cleggan Estate but as post war sheep farming destroyed the heather habitat, the Irish grouse became almost extinct.
Hugh O’Neill, the 3r d Lord Rathcavan, started a partridge shoot on some of the old Cleggan grouse Moorlands, adding to an already fine pheasant shoot along the steep banks descending from
the mountain.
