De Courcy: Anglo-Normans in Ireland, England and France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. By Steve Flanders (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2008) 205pp, 9 maps, 4 family trees, figure. ISBN 978-1-84682-094-6. Hardback, £45.00

The bulk of this important but frustratingly expensive book is taken up by a disentanglement of the genealogy of the predecessors of John de Courcy, Lord of Ulster, who for a period of twenty-eight years so dominated the history of Down and Antrim in the twelfth century. This is solidly based on evidence drawn from an exhaustive range of French and English archives, especially the signatories and witness lists of grants and charters, and is likely to remain definitive for many years, bar the unlikely discovery of some new significant source. It is densely argued and requires the reader's close attention. The repetition of popular family Christian names can at times make it difficult to follow, but the various family trees provided are absolutely invaluable. They cannot have been easy to compile.

The first Courcy in France in the early eleventh century was a son of Baudri, a German who settled in western Normandy shortly after the millennium. The family took its name from the village of Courcy just south of Caen. Robert, the second Courcy lord, was with Duke William during his conquest of England and probably fought at Hastings. Later Courcys in Normandy were essentially aristocratic civil servants who administered the routine functioning of the duchy on behalf of the Norman kings of England. The final and longest chapter devoted to John de Courcy, the family's most famous member, is of prime interest for historians of Down. Historical reference books published within the last ten years or so have no firm dates for his birth or death and describe him as being of unknown or doubtful parentage, possibly illegitimate. It is here proposed that he was the grandson of William (I) de Courcy, a younger son of the Normandy branch of the family, who established the English line in about 1100, becoming lord of Stogursey (Stoke Courcy) west of present-day Burnham-on-Sea on the Bristol Channel in Somerset and being appointed royal dapifer or steward to Henry I. It is further propounded that both John's father and younger brother were named Jordan de Courcy.

Subsequent to William (I), the Courcys were minor lords with lands in Somerset, the south-east Midlands and Yorkshire. John's father acted as steward of the family's Yorkshire estates between Skipton and York, and John was probably brought up among his connections in northern England, especially at Skipton and in Cumbria, rather than in Somerset. At the age of about 21 he may have previously been in Ireland serving as a stipendiary knight during Henry II's campaign in 1171, and, when in 1176 he returned to join the king's garrison in Dublin under William fitzAldelin, he was only about 26, but clearly already an experienced warrior.

However, as the son of a cadet aristocratic line but with no great prospects of wealth, it is not surprising that, probably entirely on his own account, he should have embarked on the risky venture of subduing Ulster with his tiny force of adventurer knights and their followers. To have chosen an unlikely mid winter to launch his attack on Downpatrick in February 1177 was doubtless to increase the element of surprise, in which he was eminently successful, the local king MacDuinn Shléibhe being taken completely unawares and having no option but hasty withdrawal.

There is an interesting assessment of the likely weapons and fighting methods which would have characterised the English and Irish forces facing each other at the second encounter after MacDuinn Shléibhe had returned eight days later with a vastly increased army. Unlike the English apparently the Irish did not deploy archers. Unfortunately the reconstruction of the Battle of Downpatrick, with its accompanying map, is not convincing, largely because it is assumed that MacDuinn Shléibhe's army made a suicidal approach to de Courcy's encampment on the slopes of Cathedral Hill, from the north across the, in those days, vastly wider waters of the Quoile floodplain, rather than overland from the direction of the river crossing at Portulla to the north-east, which is the interpretation given (with map) by Anthony Wilson in his Saint Patrick's Town (1995). Both writers base their very different versions on the Expugnatio Hibernica of Giraldus Cambrensis written not very long after the event, but Wilson would seem to have a stronger grasp of the local topography.

During his development of Ulster, the tenants whom John settled and the many religious houses which he founded and patronised provide further strong links with areas where the Courcy family had landholdings or relations in England, such as the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire, Chester, Furness, Copland in Cumbria, and Galloway in the then indeterminate Borders region. (An otherwise very useful map of the mottes created by John and his tenants as part of the structure of administration and protection of his lordship; and of the monasteries in receipt of his patronage, is marred by the misplacing of Black Abbey at Newtownards rather than south-east of Grey Abbey.)

John reached his most powerful position in 1194 when he was appointed justiciar of Ireland by Richard I, but it became increasingly difficult for him to maintain his authority in Ulster, and his campaigns outside his lordship, notably in Connaught and north-west Ulster, were frequently disastrous. After his dispossession of the lordship by Walter and Hugh de Lacy, acting on behalf of King John in 1205, John's career is subject to hypothesis and legend. It is only definitely known that his wife was already a widow by 1219. Sadly King John's continuing animosity had ensured that Hugh de Lacy, not John de Courcy, became the first Earl of Ulster.

The paucity of footnotes in this last chapter and elsewhere makes it difficult to attribute statements to specific sources in the bibliography, although presumably the original thesis on which the book is based must have been referenced much more fully.

Knockbreda: its monuments & people... Edited by Lydia Wilson (Belfast, The Follies Trust, [2009] ) 56, [1] pp, 60 colour and black and white illustrations, 2 plans, family tree. Paperback, £5 (including postage) from The Follies Trust, 100 Mullahead Road, Tandragee BT62 2LB

This beautifully produced booklet celebrates the completion of the initial project undertaken by The Follies Trust, the conservation and restoration of two of the three remarkable surviving late eighteenth-century neoclassical mausolea in Knockbreda graveyard. Britain has had its Folly Fellowship since 1988, and in 2006 The Follies Trust was set up here by a small group of local enthusiasts "to encourage the appreciation and conservation of Irish follies." Over the last two years there has been a regular programme of lectures and various fund-raising events both North and South. The rapid deterioration of the mausolea at Knockbreda since the 1960s had for long been a considerable cause for concern: one of the original four, bearing no inscriptions, was actually demolished in the 1980s, and a proposal in 1986 to raze the remaining three was only stymied by their listing the following year. In view of one of the definitions of an architectural folly as being "a costly but useless structure", it might be questioned whether mausolea, having such an obvious purpose, really qualify. However, those which have now been rescued at Knockbreda certainly show evidence of folie de grandeur on the part of the families who erected them.

Six short contributions by authoritative local and architectural historians deal with the historical context while a seventh describes the structural conservation work which was involved. In order to retain as much as possible of the patina of age, the aim was to do only enough to safeguard while appearing to do little. Such a fine balance has been triumphantly achieved.

The graveyard surrounding the new church designed by Richard Castle and given to the then rural parish of Knockbreda in 1737 by the Dowager Viscountess Midelton, mother of Arthur Hill, her younger son by a previous marriage, who had bought the townland of Breda in 1731, was to become one of the most fashionable burial places for non-parishioners in the surroundings of Belfast. As with the parish graveyard of nearby Drumbeg, many Georgian landed gentry and Belfast merchants were buried there. The earlier graveyard of the old church of Breda lay within the demesne walls of Belvoir, the house which Arthur Hill built on his new estate, and he was buried there in 1771, having become Viscount Dungannon in 1765.

After the Reformation only the wealthy and important had their vaults and memorials within churches, whereas those of lesser consequence were consigned to unmarked plots in the adjacent graveyards. The Scots were particularly strongly opposed to memorials of any kind within churches but, by the middle of the seventeenth century had begun to tolerate the marking of private plots in their graveyards with large flat slabs. The Presbyterian planters brought this custom with them to Ulster, and by the early eighteenth century headstones had become common for all denominations. The earliest surviving headstone at Knockbreda dates to 1763. In Belfast the principal graveyard at St George's had to be closed to further burials in 1798 because of frequent flooding, and so the town's merchant class had to look elsewhere, hence the popularity of outlaying places like Knockbreda. Church of Ireland graveyards were available to all who died within the boundaries of a parish regardless of denomination, and the occupying families of all three mausolea there were Presbyterian.

The most modest of the mausolea contains numerous members of the Rainey family of Greenville in the Bloomfield area of Belfast, who made their money from linen and provisioning. It may date to 1793 when John Rainey died, although the deaths of his daughter and wife, who predeceased him, are recorded on it. Much more elaborate is that of Thomas Greg (died 1796), a highly successful Belfast merchant and ship-owner who made a fortune as a licensed privateer taking cargoes from French ships in the West Indies during the Seven Years War. After the war ended in 1763, he and his brother had sugar plantations on Dominica where they had no scruples about using slave labour. In these and in an earlier enterprise as an exporter of flax seed from New York he had as a partner County Antrim born Waddell Cunningham who had emigrated to America. Later back in Belfast, the two men used their considerable wealth to change it from a mere market town into an efficient port and industrial centre. Cunningham (died 1797) occupies the third and most pretentious (but as yet unrestored) mausoleum. Although the architect is unknown, stylistically all three are almost certainly by the same hand.

Details are given of many others of the people buried at Knockbreda, besides the Raineys, Greggs and Cunninghams, ranging from leading families like the Batesons of Belvoir, Sir Charles Lanyon, the architect and M.P. for Belfast, and the scholarly MacAdam brothers of the Soho Foundry, to more humble folk like saddlers, smiths and gardeners. Back in steam: the Downpatrick and County Down Railway from 1982. By Gerry Cochrane (Newtownards, Colourpoint Books, 2009) 128pp, 152 colour and black and white illustrations, maps, tables. ISBN 978-1-906578- 29-9. Paperback, £14.99

As a record of a vision carried into effect through sheer tenacity and determination it would be hard to match this first-hand account of the conception and realization of Downpatrick's railway museum by the man who steered it through its ups and downs until 2004. Gerry Cochrane, an architect by profession, had been a train buff since early childhood, nurtured as a holidaymaker and later as a commuter on the Belfast & County Down Railway, and with the meticulous longterm construction of a magnificent model steam locomotive under his belt. He had a lifelong interest in working railway museums. His ambition was to bring back into operation some portion of the BCDR which had been closed down in 1950.

The original idea was to reinstate the track from Market Street to Ardglass, instead of an earlier proposal put forward by the Belfast & County Down Railway Museum Trust to base a museum on the old route between Ballynahinch and Saintfield. Another competitor was a scheme floated by the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland for a Scarva to Banbridge line. Fortunately Down District Council came down on the side of the Downpatrick museum. Labour, restoration, maintenance and day-to-day operation were to be provided entirely by volunteers with assistance from ACE (Action for Community Employment) workers. The Council was to be responsible for acquisition and sub-leasing of land and would also take on funding for building a station, workshop and platforms. A 1985 rearguard action to revive the Ballynahinch proposal alarmingly but briefly threatened to derail all of this.

The amount of work undertaken and successfully carried out by the dedicated band of volunteers has been astounding, especially as a number of them have been well past retirement age. Track had to be laid, rollingstock and locomotives sourced and restored, ancillary fixtures such as signals and signal box, water tower, and locomotive shed both found and erected. Ideally the museum was to reflect the Edwardian era of the railway age on the BCDR, but inevitably some items have had to come from other lines in places like Antrim and Londonderry: some locomotives have either been purchased or leased from as far away as Mullingar.

The first locomotives to be acquired in 1986 were diesels of the 1960s which were needed for track-laying, construction and shunting work, and the first steam locomotive came back into service only in 1989 after an enormous two-year programme of restoration. The locomotive leased from Irish Railways in 2008 is now the oldest operating steam locomotive in Ireland. Of the carriages collected over the years some had been in use by local farmers as chicken sheds, an 1862 first-class Ulster Railway saloon was serving as a children's playhouse in Gilford, and one ex-BCDR carriage is actually a reconstruction joining two halves of different 1897 carriages! What may one day be the museum's pride and joy is the 1897 Royal saloon built for a visit of the Duke and Duchess of York and used from the 1920s as the saloon on the Saturday Golfer's Express from Belfast to Newcastle. Its dilapidated appearance on its arrival at the museum would have led lesser men to abandon hope, but nothing has ever been impossible for the doughty volunteers, who have taken such things in their stride as the nightmare of moving outsize and heavy loads by road, like the all-night unloading of a huge steam crane weighing over 95 tons after its journey from Larne to Downpatrick.

Landmarks in the museum's history have included the inspired transfer of the ruinous manager's house of the gasworks across Market Street to be rebuilt as the station; and the opening of the loop platform in late 1987. Undoubtedly the greatest achievement so far has been the extension of the track to Inch Abbey, which necessitated the reconstruction of the old girder bridge across the Quoile. Difficulties with landowners had led to the abandonment of the earlier intended Ballydugan Mill and Ardglass spurlines and their replacement by a link which would appeal more directly to tourists. Although funds for this were in place in 1997, it took another four years to secure the necessary land, and the line opened only in September 2004.

There have been disappointments and discouraging experiences along the way, such as the mindless attention of vandals in shunting yards at Dundalk and in workshops in Newcastle and after hours at the museum. By far the worst disaster was the destruction of the station building by arsonists in 2002. Although the structural damage was covered by insurance, many period fittings and items of equipment, together with the historical documentation of the BCDR so painstakingly assembled over the years, were irreplaceable.

The creation of the museum has naturally cost a great deal of money. A full break-down is given of the huge effort put into raising the necessary funding (even from as far away as Japan). The principal backers have been the International Fund for Ireland, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the European Rural Development Fund, Down District Council, and the Northern Ireland Museums Council, which has recently granted full museum accreditation. Hats off to Gerry Cochrane and his merry men who have brought all this about with such patience and undiminished enthusiasm!

Recent periodicals: selective contents lists [Down Survey: Yearbook of Down County Museum 2008] People of Down

'Sir Godfrey Kneller and the Southwell and Cromwell families', Eileen Black [Kneller is known to have painted portraits of members of these two families, owners of the Manor of Downpatrick, at least nineteen times. The three portraits in the possession of Down County Museum are here tentatively dated to 1702 and 1705, two of them being definitely assigned to Kneller and one attributed to him]; 'County Down presentments - 1790', William Stranney [An explanation of the workings of the Assize and Grand Jury system in local government in the light of a printed Presentment in the museum archive]; 'Pieces of the past: patchwork quilts and quilters of County Down', Madeleine McAllister; '1900 and 1932: two dates in history and what happened in Lecale', M.L. Simpson [A concert in Downpatrick to raise funds for sick and wounded soldiers in hospital in Maritzburg during the Boer War; and the vast pageant at Audley's Castle celebrating the 1500th anniversary of St Patrick's arrival at Saul and reputed to have been attended by an audience of 5000]; 'Brothers in arms: from Newtownards to the Somme via Downpatrick', Ivan Patterson [The military careers of William and James Gibson in the Royal Engineers Signals Company and their attempts to goad the Newtownards town authorities into providing a war memorial (not achieved until 1934)]; 'Windows on the past: commemorative medals in the Down County Museum collection', Robert Heslip [Contemporary memorials of the Battle of the Boyne from 1691, the Pacification of Ireland from 1691, and the Union from 1801]; 'Rome in the age of St Patrick', Michael King [Surviving classical buildings and early Christian churches in Rome in the 5th century]; 'John Hughes' gold nugget', Michael King [John Waring Maxwell Hughes, born Inch 1816, died Ardglass 1906, prospector in Californian gold rush of 1849/50]; 'Edwardian people', M.L.Simpson [A dozen photographs of mid and south Down people and places, ca 1900-1911]; 'The grave of Alexander Leslie Gracey', Michael King [1823-1886, a surgeon, one of the Graceys of Ballyhossett, buried at Lindisfarne]

[Inverbrena No 13] Strangford: memories from Inverbrena, 2008 (Inverbrena Local History Group)

'I remember Strangford 1956', Noel Armour [Ten months of idyllic cycle patrols and non-events as a constable in the RUC station in a tranquil Strangford]; 'Cairnashoke 2 (An ego trip)', E.J. McMullan [Concluding the author's reminiscences of life at Kilclief Public Elementary School, 1936-1945, with complete reproduction of the school register for the same period]; 'Extract from Home Words [and Ballyculter Parish Magazine] July 1878' [Chapter 10 of an account of Strangford Lough]; 'History of Strangford and district Credit Union [1967-2007]', Michael McConville.

Journal of the Upper Ards Historical Society, No 33, 2009

'The Abbacy Church at Ardquin, Portaferry', David Dunlop [Historical notes on the churches which have stood on the site since Norman times, with a short report on the Celtic cross fragment and Norman grave slab found during excavations in 2008]; 'Queen's University Marine Biology Station, a personal account - plus a little science. Part 7', P.J.S. Boaden; 'Sister Catherine Dynes M.B.E., Night Sister, Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast', M.K. Robb [Catherine Dynes (1878-1968) from an Ardkeen farming family served the hospital for 52 years and became a legendary figure, having one of the Geriatric Units there named after her]; 'Glastry College 1957-2007' [A selective photographic record of some past pupils]; 'St Patrick's Primary School, Ballygalget 1932' [Two photographs of pupils and building]; 'Henry Crangle of the Royal Navy & Coastguard', Jim Blaney [Crangle was born at Tara, Portaferry in 1834 and after an eventful early career in Kingstown and Hartlepool served latterly attached to the Strangford coastguard division, dying in 1903]; 'Newtownards Chronicle & County Down Observer: extracts from July 1908-June 1909', Gerard Lennon [Matters of the moment included attempts to move an Ards Railway Bill through Parliament; a suggestion to utilize tidal ebb and flow to generate electricity for Portaferry and to run the proposed Ards Railway; alarmingly frequent shipwrecks in the Cloughey area; and pleas to have the unsatisfactory position of the buoy at Strangford Bar moved].

Gordon Wheeler