Parke's Castle (also known as Newtown Castle and O'Rourke's Castle) is a 17th century semi-fortified manor house, situated on the northeast shore of Lough Gill. The castle is built on the site of an earlier sixteenth-century O'Rourke (Uí Ruairc) Gaelic tower house. The castle and bawn had come into the possession of Robert Parke by 1628, possibly earlier. He had been granted some of the former O'Rourke lands as part of the Plantations. By 1635, Parke had completed his fortified manor house on the site of the older Gaelic castle.
Once the Parke family were deceased, the castle passed to the Gore family by the late 1670s, and the manor house was last lived in around 1700. The building quickly became a ruin and remained uninhabited for over 300 years. The bawn was used as a farmyard and stables by the residents of Newtown village right up until the mid-20th century. The building was acquired by the Office of Public Works in 1935.
Excavations directed by Claire Foley between 1971 and 1975 revealed the foundations of O'Rourke's tower house and a number of other structures within the bawn. The castle was restored and refurbished between 1980 and 1988, and has been open to the public on a seasonal basis since 1990.
References:Towering 52 meters above the sea, Bengtskär lighthouse is the tallest one in Scandinavia. The building started in in 1905 after the shipwreck of S/S Helsingfors and was completed in 1906. The lighthouse was designed by architect Florentin Granholm. On December a special petrol lantern, designed and built in Paris, was brought to Bengtskär and installed atop the tower.
German fleet bombarded Bengstkär in the First World War in 1914. Since the Gulf of Finland was heavily mined, it was not until 1919 that the surrounding seas were declared safe for shipping, that the light was lit again.
After the war the military value of Bengtskär increased as part of the defence system of independent Finland. In Second World War (1941) Soviet Union made a suprise attack to island. After a bloody battle, the small Finnish garrison emerged victorious. Intermittent repairs to the facility continued during the post-war period.