| Books Strangford: Portrait of an Irish Lough Harnassing the Tides: the early medieval tide mills at Nendrum Monestery, Strangford Lough Where Donard Guards Our DJ Recent periodicals: selective contents lists Inverbrena [No 12] Strangford: memoried from Inverbrena 2007 Journal of the Upper Ards Historical Society, No 32, 2008 |
|
Strangford: portrait of an Irish Lough Put prosaically, the lough is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, containing several Areas of Special Scientific Interest and seven statutory National Nature Reserves; it is also a Special Protection Area, and the largest Marine Nature Reserve in the United Kingdom. However, aesthetically it must be one of the most hauntingly lovely places on earth. There have been previous attempts to capture this in collections of photographs and paintings, but it is hard to see how the present collaborative celebration of the landscape, the wildlife and the built heritage of the area could be bettered. Alain Le Garsmeur is an award-winning world class photographer who has lived in Northern Ireland since 1990. For this book he has taken photographs during the course of an entire year, mirroring the changing seasons and frequently repeating the same views in the varying light of both night and day. His superb wide-angled panoramas in particular can only be described as stunning. Six chapters deal with individual stretches of the coastline in an anti-clockwise itinerary from Ballyquintin Point to Killard. Ian Hill's accompanying poetic commentary is a heady brew of hard fact and observation of what he sees and hears, laced with the uncertainties of mythology and folklore. In places, what he writes is more reverie than record. Whereas Le Garsmeur obviously delights in nuances of colour and mood, Hill revels in language, rolling words around his tongue as a connoisseur would savour a fine wine: there are glorious alliterative litanies of names, be they fish, birds, plants, townlands or types of small boat; and onomatopoeic bird sounds - the 'whaup' of a curlew's wings, the 'rroonk' of the brent geese, the 'knut' of the knots. An unusual but welcome feature is the provision of botanical and zoological names both in their official Latin form and in their equivalent Irish. There is much recondite information on such matters as kelp grids and mediaeval fishtraps, or the possible purpose of the coneshaped caps on stonebuilt gateposts. Did you know that four hundred million tons of water ebb and flow through the Narrows every twenty-four hours? If you should require hints on cooking and enjoying shellfish, inquire within!
Harnessing The site of the mediaeval monastery on Mahee Island was first identified by the Revd William Reeves in 1844 in the course of research for his Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Down and Connor and Dromore (1847) and it was excavated between 1922 and 1924 by H.C.Lawlor whose report of 1925, although now recognized as flawed, has hitherto remained the main source for the archaeology. Now we have this report by two principal authors and eleven contributing experts on the Environment and Heritage Service funded intertidal excavations of 1999- 2001 on the foreshore below the monastery, which resulted from the Service's new responsibilities for marine archaeology. Two horizontal-wheel type tide mills were indentified; the first dated by dendrochronology to 619-621 and hence at present the earliest known in the world. The second mill was a replacement of about 789 and demonstrated development in technology. The associated ponds and dams of both mills had previously been interpreted as typical seashore fishtraps. (At a time when we are congratulating ourselves on the application of tidal power in the Narrows of Strangford Lough to generate electricity, it is humbling to realize that the monks of Nendrum had tapped its potential almost 1400 years ago.) Following a general overview there are detailed chapters on all the mills' physical components: the dams and millponds; the penstocks or flumes (both hollowedout tree trunk and stone-lined); the waterwheels (the earlier flat-paddled and the later scoop-paddled) and stone-constructed wheelhouse; the millstones and millhouses; and the tailraces. There are separate reports on the worked wood finds and on the animal bone finds. For the non-specialist local historian the two most interesting chapters are Thomas McErlean's survey of the history of Nendrum in the light of modern interpretation of the documentary sources, and his reassessment of the archaeology since Lawlor's report. Although the sources would please St Mo-Choí (or Cáelán) as a contemporary of St Patrick in the 5th century, it must be accepted for the time being that the early mediaeval monastery was not founded before the early 7th century, and it disappears from the annals in the late 10th century. The round tower is of the 10th century or later, and the stone church, which would have replaced an earlier wooden structure, does not predate the 10th century. A small and short-lived Benedictine priory was established by John de Courcy in the late 12th century, and the enlarged stone church became a parish church not much later. Now, with the evidence provided by the tide mills, some of the dates suggested by Lawlor can be revised considerably. Even if his standards of the 1920s compromised proper interpretation of the site, Lawlor carefully indicated where he had not excavated, so fortunately what remained undisturbed may eventually reveal a great deal more, using the professional techniques of today. For those who may wish to follow up the subject in
even more detail than this exhaustive and most
attractively produced report, there are 22 close-packed
columns of bibliography.
Where To quote from the Preface: "This account of one area traces the arrival of the earliest settlers, the rich heritage of churches and cashels, and charts the development of the town from the early Magennis castle on the Shimna river to the end of the landlord era, as well as telling the tale of Newcastle harbour and Dundrum Bay." As it was written to mark the bicentenary of the building of the harbour pier in 1807, there is a strong emphasis on the southern end of the town around the harbour, King Street and South Promenade; and on the seafarers, fishermen and grim maritime history of Dundrum Bay, for long considered the most dangerous in Ireland. The author expresses the hope that other parts of the town will receive full attention in the future. Judging by the depth and quality of his research so far, it is sincerely to be wished that he may undertake this task himself. The tower house at the mouth of the Shimna was built by Phelim Magennis in 1588 in succession to a former Magennis stronghold guarding the ford which may have been as early as the second half of the 14th century and which had come to be known as the 'new' castle to distinguish it from the old Norman castle at Dundrum, by that time in ruins. By 1616 there was already a landing-place on the Shimna. The Magennis lands at Newcastle were forfeited following their part in the 1641/2 insurrection and passed first to the Hawkins family at Rathfriland and then to a lawyer, Edmund Mathews, who in 1747 sold the estate to William Annesley, a barrister, who was already in possession of another Magennis estate in Castlewellan. The Annesley family were to plan and oversee the development of Castlewellan and Newcastle for the next two hundred years. William's son, the 2nd Earl Annesley, as Chief Commissioner of the Board of Excise in Dublin, was responsible for preventative measures against smuggling and this was his primary reason for persuading Parliament to fund the building of a permanent pier at Newcastle in 1807. Although the principal Annesley residence was the modest Castlewellan Cottage which had been built in 1745, younger members of the family continued to occupy the old castle at Newcastle until its demolition and replacement by the Annesley Arms Hotel in 1835. The 3rd Earl was responsible for the building in the early 1830s of Donard Lodge on the slopes overlooking Newcastle. This was to remain the main Annesley home until the construction of Castlewellan Castle in 1858. The dowager Countess Annesley continued to live there until her death in 1891, but it was allowed to deteriorate in the hands of several tenants and was finally demolished in 1966. Castlewellan Castle was sold to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1967. In response to the rapid growth of Newcastle as a watering-place in the second half of the 19th century, the 5th Earl Annesley had spent large sums on the provision of a reservoir and waterworks, on town drainage and on a sea wall and promenade. However, the harbour had been badly damaged by the Big Wind of 1839. Its replacement was finally completed by the Board of Works in 1850, only to be the subject of such frequent repair bills that the County Grand Jury refused any further expenditure after 1869. To the detriment of trade, the export of granite from the quarries on Millstone Mountain and the fishing industry, it was to remain much silted up and in a ruinous state until 1905. Within 50 years changing methods of transportation led even this reconstruction to become mainly a shelter for pleasure craft. Many of the landscape and seascape photographs
taken by the author are of considerable beauty. The 23
pages of meaty notes should on no account be skipped.
Our DJ The annual Down Survey has heretofore usually taken the form of articles on miscellaneous items held by the Down County Museum, or on the Museum's holdings centred on a single theme, and has been noticed in these pages amongst the periodicals, but a distinctive format and highly apposite design have been adopted for this stand-alone volume drawn from one of the Museum's most important single collections. Daniel J. McNeill, born in Dundrum in 1906, started taking photographs as a teenager in 1922 and his love affair with the camera was to last for nearly 70 years. After teaching in Belfast and Bangor he came to Downpatrick in 1944 as Principal of the Technical College, which owed its subsequent rapid development to his formidable energy and vision. This selection from the approximately 40,000 negatives and prints presented to the Museum by his family in 1988/89 has been grouped under a number of the topics which preoccupied him most: his family, the Flynns and McNeills, and their surroundings in Dundrum; the physical development of Downpatrick from the 1950s until the 1980s (he rarely missed a demolition, and there are some fascinating 'before' and 'after' shots); his evocative record of daily life in some of the smaller towns in County Down; the steady growth of the courses available at the Technical College; aspects of farming, fishing and granite working in the county; and leisure and sporting events. Many of D.J's photographs transcend the mere record and are strikingly composed works of art in their own right. We also owe him a great deal for the work he did in making copies of early historical photographs which had been brought to his attention by local people. Allen Thompson, the Museum's photographer, has done admirable work in preparing sometimes deteriorating originals for publication, and there is a wealth of informative and identifying material in the captions contributed by members of the Museum staff. Recent periodicals: selective contents lists
[Inverbrena No 12] Journal Gordon Wheeler
|