Slane Farm Hostel

We’ve stayed here for the Viking Festival three years in a row – kids love the place, but every year I keep hoping they’ll update the campsite kitchen. Sadly, it’s still the same: moldy, outdated appliances, just two plates, and fridges that should really be replaced. Benches and tables were covered in bird droppings (no cleaning supplies provided), the black paint on the fences ruined several sets of our kids’ clothes, and during the festival they put just one toilet roll per bathroom – while piles of toilet paper were visible through their house window. The location is perfect, but it’s really time for the owners to renovate and provide at least the basics.

A welcome break to hotels and busy cities. The farm was so beautiful, our room was spacious and clean, powerful shower, a kitchenette for full meals with the kids. Quiet with windows open, and plenty of outdoor space with friendly animals nearby to say hello. I wish we had more time here! We had a private bathroom, but there were other facilities around back for campers - a whole row of WCs along the huge grassy areas with fruit trees. Wi-Fi was included, cell signal was good, and we found a usb port on the tv to charge up devices. The farm felt very safe for travelers and families. There was adequate parking in the gated lot. If I HAD to mention cons, previous guests pilfered kitchen supplies so we were a little short on silverware and dishes, and the kids bunks could use a mattress re-fresh. We’d still come right back on anther visit, though.

We stayed at the campsite with our three children under 11. Gemma was a fantastic host - answered every question, always on hand to help and extremely welcoming. The site is a gem and ideal for family camping. Small with a playground and friendly animals (seeing the donkey and feeding chickens were a hit). Very good facilities, with hot water and a kitchen (handy to eat indoors when the weather turned). Easy commute to Dublin, Newgrange and Tara.

I made an error when booking and booked the wrong date, when I arrived I realised my error however Gemma and her husband were really great about it and helped to accommodate myself & my son. They were both extremely pleasant to deal with and helpful. ||The accommodation itself is excellent, I love the whole cottage theme and the accommodation itself was very comfortable, clean and had everything we needed, was really happy with it.||I will definitely look forward to staying at Slane Farm Hostel again

Hello, this camping was our first stop after arriving with the ferry in Ireland. We are from Germany and wanted to vist the sightseiing points aroud Drogheda like Monasterboice, Slane Castle....we travel with a VW Bus and stayed on the camping grond. It is a very nice and quiet place, nice landscape, you can walk to Slane castle and also into the village by foot. We were the only guests on the camping ground. We can recommend this place, staff was really friendly and helpful, anyway the kitchen beside the camping ground should be cleaned, it was quite dirty and really not well maintained.

We stayed 4 nights which was not planned in our trip. But our camper van broke down. The owners were perfect. They called a mechanic to repair it. We were able to be accommodated. They are incredibly kind. The place is bucolic not far from the sites to visit. At your disposal you have a kitchen and a living room. Everything to feel good Thank you to them for their welcome and support Bretons on the move

I actually get where the good and bad reviews are coming from. The courtyard outside the cottages is great for a large group together and the bathrooms in the cottage look recently renovated with powerful showers. However everything is a bit shabby without the chic. There were quite a few cobwebs and the carpet threadbare with a few cracked tiles. The location is great, the communal feeling fantastic but all a bit dated. Wouldn't stop me staying again though. Can't comment on the camping side of things.

One of the worst campsites we have stayed on. Toilets and showers old, dirty and dated. Only two level pitches and the best one was taken. After trying to pitch away from the partially covered waste water point and could not get the van level even with ramps we gave up and backed up to the waste point. Did not use facilities used our own in the van. The campers kitchen is dingy, dirty and electrically unsafe. Could not park on the grass signs said not to and also too far from electric hook up point. Also still a steep slope. Had to leave payment at reception due to no one being around when we got there or when we left. Nowhere to empty black waste either. So if you have a motorhome or caravan don't go there. In all our years of motorhoming this ranks as the worst we have stayed on and at 25 euros a night it is quite honestly a rip off.

Rolled into Slane with no place to stay and a quick word at the Inside Out (a great restaurant!) got us the number of a pub owner, who sent us out to Slane Farm. (The Slane network is aces!) the hostel is comfortable, cozy, clean, and reasonably priced. I'll be staying here on future trips.

Our experience with the Slane Farm Hostel was very very nice. After being on the road for some time making our way to Belfast, we came upon the Slane Farm Hostel. Service was good, as we walked in and found someone very quickly. The Slane (Farm) Hostel experience is like staying at someones house, so it is a very quaint relaxed type feel. Do not expect a Ritz Carlton service desk and in my opinion thankfully so, being on the Irish countryside away from the complication of the big city is the Ireland experience. My father was given an in house room while the rest of us camped in tents on the backside of the facility. The in house room had fresh linens, towels, shower, a restroom, and was well kept. The outside camping area had showers a restroom facility, a 24-hour guest kitchen, as well as a communal dining area. They also had a game room with a television, cards, and various board games to play. On the backside of the facility there was a donkey named Jack that would graze the large grassy field, he would walk up to where our tents were, and we would feed him apples in the morning. Very pleasant, relaxed, and beautiful country experience. I will return on future journeys!

We booked in for the weekend of the Slane concert, 25 EUR per person for two nights. Good value and a good plan of action as my abiding memory of going to a concert at Slane Castle was the endless amount of walking from car parks / bus parks to the venue. And then the huge amount of time spent sitting in traffic trying to leave. It's a great venue, but I have avoided it in the past because of how difficult it is to get to and from there. Slane Farm Hostel was 300 metres from the Slane Castle grounds if the information they provided was to be believed. I took this with a pinch of salt, but it had to be better than arriving and leaving on the day, right? It ended up being just over 1 KM away for a finish (from camp to the gate we were allowed to enter by). Still, it was better than previous experiences. I don't know why I thought camping for the Foo Fighters concert was going to be anything other than a regular festival camping experience. There was plenty of screaming and shouting, which is fine (ear plugs). Other festival camping effects that I wont go into. But hey, SFH can't control people being idiots. And I need to finally accept I've grown out of camping at concerts :) The first camping field did seem to me to be too full by the time they opened the second field. I'm sure the staff controlling this tried to get people to park and pitch sensibly and I can imagine it's like herding cats. Our plans to depart at a reasonable hour on Sunday morning looked scuppered. But we managed to leave before 10 am in the end, which was great. At the moment I'm not sure I can recommend this as an alternative to going to and from Slane Castle for concerts on the day itself. Catch 22. All that said the staff we dealt with directly seemed nice enough. And I saw who looked like the owner dealing with an issue with the toilets down by the yards on Saturday morning - it was good to see they cared about that. And the toilets down by the yard always had loo roll.. If an opportunity to camp here at any other time of the year came up, I would go back to Slane Farm Hostel as their facilities seemed fine.

We flew into Dublin from Boston to arrive here at 4:30am local time. By 10am local, we had been up perhaps all but 2 of the prior 26 hours, and had had only 4 hours of sleep before that, so the narrowness of Irish roads ... was becoming more and more of surreal descent into madness for us. We opened up our Lonely Planet guide, then, and found out about this place, which really is quite colorful and charming, with a beautiful hill covered with gorse and grass and shadows of clouds across the way, where the smell of cows, when you are very very tired, can be forgiven. Once we got here, though, we could get into the lobby, ring the bell, and... not find anyone except the very nice little dog and the gentleman who mows the lawn, who didn't even know his employers' number. After some very worried waiting, knowing we didn't have any more driving in us and concerned that there wouldn't be anyone there to help us at ten in the morning, a nice young man with cow-mucky wellies came by and gave us a key, telling us his mother or sister would charge us later because he didn't know how much the rooms cost. Fine by us. We collapsed into a bed with more sag in it than - hm. Not really many metaphors come to mind for that except for off-color ones, so I'll leave it as: we collapsed into an objectively terrible but subjectively marvelous bed and fell into what can only be described as the shortest coma in history. That's okay, too; if Lonely Planet is to be believed, this is one of the more reasonable places to stay around here, which has its own value. We are exceptionally grateful for having been let in so early in the day. Now that we're up, there are a lot of sites of historic significance around here - Tara and Newgrange are the ones I know best from my past as a precocious teenager studying Irish prehistory in the CTYI programme at DCU, but the site of the Battle of the Boyne is also near, as is Monasterboice (which is beautiful in a way similar to the ruins of Glendalough in Wicklow, but without quite as lovely a natural setting). There are also some forest preserves nearby that we hope to investigate on the way north to Belfast tomorrow.

My experience was great! Bunk room was clean and the staff were nice! The kitchen was stocked with dishes. The farm atmosphere is very peaceful.