The Lady Alice Temple, Hillsborough Castle, The Square, Hillsborough, County Down, BT26 6AG

The Lady Alice Temple is a free-standing circular garden temple erected around 1880 on the grounds of Hillsborough Castle. It is constructed of masonry and cast-iron, representing a notable example of Neo-classical design in the area.

The temple consists of a circular-plan podium of three nosed sandstone steps supporting ten cast-iron Ionic columns. These columns carry a plain circular masonry entablature topped with a copper-clad masonry dome. A painted masonry wall is constructed between four of the columns on the western side, with a cantilevered timber bench. The use of cast-iron rather than ashlar stone was economical and made this structure unusual among garden temples of its type. The copper cladding is probably replacement, but the structure appears to retain mostly original materials.

The temple was named after Lady Alice Maria Hill (Countess of Bective), sister of the fifth Marquess of Downshire and of Lord Arthur Hill, who lived at Hillsborough Castle during the minority of the sixth Marquess in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The temple occupies an elevated site overlooking Lady Alice Lake to the east, positioned at the end of the Yew Walk with the Lime Walk aligned to the north. It provides a picturesque focal point at the conclusion of the impressive yew walk, which was planted along the line of the old Moira Road by about 1895. The temple first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1902–3 and replaced an earlier summer house shown on the second edition of 1858.

Garden temples became fashionable throughout Britain and Ireland following Sir John Vanbrugh's creation of a temple garden at Castle Howard in the early eighteenth century. The Lady Alice Temple exemplifies the simple circular type consisting of a ring of open columns supporting a dome, variations of which were constructed throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The temple has group value with the other listed structures at Hillsborough Castle and forms part of a broader collection of garden features on the castle grounds.