Afternoon Tea in Kilronan Castle

Well, that didn’t last long. It has just been about a month since a few friends and I went for afternoon tea in a local restaurant called Eala Bhan. Straight after that, we already planned our next afternoon tea next month. We all decided on Kilronan Castle. It is only a 30 minutes drive from Sligo so not too bad.

Yesterday was the day. This time we came as a four piece. Three of my friends from Ballymote and me coming from Sligo Town. We all met up in the grounds of Kilronan Castle. I have been to Kilronan Castle multiple times before, mainly for wedding receptions.

There were two places you could have the afternoon tea in… either the drawing room or, what we called it, the hall way. As the drawing room was a bit crowded and loud, we decided to take a seat in the hall way. We came just on time because it was actually getting packed once we arrived and people found it hard to get a seat. A week beforehand I rang up as I thought you might have to book in advanced but that was not the case. First come first serve.

We were greeted by Mark, our waiter, who presented us with the menus. We already knew what we wanted though. In Kilronan Castle you can actually choose from two different afternoon tea. There is Traditional Afternoon Tea and Light Afternoon. The difference is basically you don’t get the delights/ dessert with light afternoon tea. And because we don’t do light afternoon tea, we went for the traditional one. We got 2 pots of tea and could top up if we needed to.

Kilronan Castle is very famous for weddings. I don’t know if there is a weekend where they don’t have a wedding on. We drove down on a Saturday which would mean they would be extremely busy. In my opinion they should still keep wedding and general guests separate. The reason why I am saying that is because from the minute we sat down, to the minute we actually got our afternoon tea, an hour passed. They did apologize in fairness but it was a bit of a shame. I think they do require maybe one or two more staff members on days like that. Anyway it came in the end. The plus side of it was… they baked us fresh scones. They were still warm on the plate.

Like every other traditional afternoon tea, there were 3 tiers of food. The way I am talking you’d think I am an expert on afternoon tea but this has only been my third time!

The first layer contained of a mixture of sandwiches including brown bread with smoked salmon and ham and cheese, croissant with chicken and bacon filling and white bread with egg mayonnaise. The smoked salmon was so good. I could have eaten a whole plate of it. I love smoked salmon.

The second tier contained of two types of scones. A plain one and a fruit one. With that you had the option to choose from creme fraiche and jam. The scones were absolutely delicious but because scones are so filling in general I only managed to eat one of them. Then I do feel guilty as I had a sneaky sandwich 3 hours beforehand.

Last but not least was the delights tier. Some delicious stuff on it. A raspberry macaroon was on the menu. I had my first macaroons only 3 weeks ago when we were on holiday in Spain. To be honest I am not too impressed with macaroons. Of course that doesn’t mean somebody might love this one. I think it was a raspberry filling. Furthermore we had a raspberry mouse which was basically melting in your mouth. The best dessert I personally liked was the shortbread biscuit with the lemon on top. I think it might have been actually Mango. The chocolatey dessert was a brownie. Very tasty too I must say. We cleared the plates for sure.

After our last disappointing afternoon tea I really enjoyed this one. It really picked it up again.I would definitely recommend it to anyone else if you are in the area and you want to treat yourself. The traditional afternoon tea comes at a cost of €22.50 which I find very reasonable. If you decide to go for the light one, that’s €16.50. Onto the next afternoon tea planning.