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Sarah Ferguson has taken refuge at a secluded wellness retreat in Ireland as she seeks to maintain a low profile following her departure from the Royal Lodge. This move comes in the wake of the controversies surrounding her connection with Jeffrey Epstein.
The 66-year-old former Duchess of York left the UK after tensions surrounding her and her ex-husband intensified, leading to his arrest last week.
While her ex-husband, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, was seen multiple times in Windsor and at the Sandringham estate as police prepared to visit, Ferguson has remained out of the public eye. Her last public appearance was a brief one at the Christening of her granddaughter Athena at St James’s Palace on December 12.
This absence has sparked widespread curiosity about her whereabouts. According to a recent report by the Daily Mail, she has spent much of this period at a well-known Swiss clinic.
Additionally, it is reported that she has sought sanctuary in the UAE, where she has established connections and potential supporters.
Now we have learned that she also apparently visited a second similar retreat, the Ballyliffin Lodge & Spa in Donegal – where she was spotted at the local airport earlier this month.
It’s not the first time she has visited the spa: when she was there in 2024 she posted a TikTok filmed on a nearby beach in which she said: ‘ I find things get sometimes overwhelming, I just try and take myself off to the most beautiful, wonderful blast of fresh air.’
A royal source said: ‘Last time Sarah visited Donegal she spoke about how it was somewhere she could escape to when things were ‘overwhelming’ – and they can’t ever have been more overwhelming for her than they have been in recent weeks.
Sarah Ferguson is pictured speaking in a TikTok video posted from Donegal in October 2024
The swimming pool at Ballyliffin Lodge & Spa in Donegal, where Sarah has been staying
‘And just as she did with the Zurich trip, she knew what she was going to in Donegal as she’d been there before and that it was very remote and very discrete so there was minimal chance of her presence becoming known to the wider world.
‘She seems to be very keen indeed to avoid being seen while she works out what to do next. ‘
In the video shot in late 2024 – her then second visit to Donegal in six months – she candidly spoke to her followers while taking a stroll on the stunning beach.
She said: ‘Hello everybody! I’m here in Donegal….Looking at the ocean, looking at the beach, looking at the shells. It’s great to be in the wind and just getting fresh air on my face.’
She added in her caption: ‘The benefits of getting some fresh air everyday really can do wonders for you. Thank you Donegal!’
The 40 bedroom hotel and lodge, which recently reopened following a £1.5million refit, is just off the famously scenic Wild Atlantic Way that follows the remote west coast of Ireland.
The ex-Duchess has ancestral roots in Ireland and it seems the country has frequently been her refuge when time gets hard going back over 20 years.
Following her divorce, in 2005 she said in an interview: ‘Ireland gave me back my life’ and said she wanted to be buried in Powerscourt House, her family’s historic estate in Wicklow.
She went on: ‘The Irish people gave me back my life and I feel very strongly that I went back to the core values.
‘I think that is why I feel so comfortable in Ireland because the Irish people accept Sarah as Sarah instead of trying to make her into anything else’
Sarah and Andrew at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in London on September 16 last year
The following year, 2006, she again evoked the notion of being ‘saved’ by Ireland: ‘I was just separated and I had the two girls with me and I was feeling very insecure and really lost,’ she said about having gone to the country as a refugee.
So frequently did she visit the west coast of Ireland that locals began to jokingly refer to her as ‘the Duchess of Cork’.
Earlier this month the Mail revealed how Fergie had also secretly taken refuge in the world-renowned £13,000-a-day Paracelsus Recovery Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland for much of January.
She is also understood to have visited the UAE in a similarly low key way that saw her evade photographers and journalists.
And prior to disappearing overseas Ferguson is believed to have made late night visits to her former Royal Lodge home in Windsor to recover prized items.
All of this furtive nomadic movement has online wags joke that Fergie is on ‘a secret sofa-surfing world tour’.
It has also led to speculation about where she will finally settle with increasing doubts that she will ever be able to live in the UK again.
Her daughter Beatrice has a Cotswolds home with a self-contained annex – or so-called granny flat – in the grounds but this would be a very public existence.
She previously spent years co-habiting with Andrew despite their being divorced but this was facilitated by the sheer size of Royal Lodge – it has some 30 rooms – and his reduced circumstances in Norfolk mean that resuming this arrangement there is thought to be completely out of the question for Ferguson.
Sarah visited the Ballyliffin Lodge & Spa in Donegal, a remote Irish wellness retreat (file photo)
Royal author Andrew Lownie, who wrote a damning book on the scandal-hit couple called Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, has said that she may end up living overseas – and that multi-millionaires in Dubai and the surrounding countries of Bahrain and Qatar will probably be bankrolling Fergie already.
He said: ‘In Britain neither Sarah nor Andrew will be socially accepted again whatever they try to do or wherever they go. But in the Middle East no one will care about what they have got up to.’
Earlier this week Fergie and Andrew’s daughter Princess Eugenie was seen in public for the first time since the arrest when she ventured out with husband Jack Brooksbank in London.
The 12th in line to the throne was dressed casually in Nike trainers, blue leggings, a jacket and a North Face baseball cap as she grabbed a coffee in Notting Hill.
Eugenie was seen standing next to her husband, who was wearing a colourful bobble hat as he spoke on the phone on a street outside Hagen Espresso Bar.
Princess Beatrice was most recently seen in public in late January when she was photographed taking her daughter Sienna horse riding with her father – shortly before he was forced to move out of his Royal Lodge house in Windsor.
After Andrew moved instead to a farmhouse on the Sandringham estate he was raided by police and arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
The former prince spent 11 hours in custody on his 66th birthday last week while officers searched his property at Sandringham before he was released under investigation.