A royal charter, a horse fair, and a town that kept it going
The May Fair
On 16 December 1756 King George II granted the Earl of Donegall the right to hold two yearly fairs on the town and lands of Ballyclare, at a rent of thirteen shillings and fourpence a year. The May fair began as a local horse fair and grew until cavalry buyers were travelling here from across Europe to bid on the stock. In the nineteenth century the demand for horses was such that the Monday was given over to the trade and the Tuesday remained the fair proper. The cattle fair faded out long ago; the May Fair still runs every May, a seven-day event beginning on a Tuesday in the middle of the month, with rides, stalls, and a crowd of around twenty thousand. The horses are still there on the Tuesday morning if you know where to look.
The river that built the valley
The Sixmilewater
The Sixmilewater rises in the moorland around Ballyboley Forest and runs west for thirty kilometres through Ballyclare, Doagh, Templepatrick and Antrim, where it empties into Lough Neagh. The valley around the river was settled hard in the seventeenth-century Plantation — the Adair family at Ballymena, the Donegalls at the lough, the Presbyterian planters at every crossroads — and the religious revival known as the Six Mile Water Revival broke out in this valley in 1625, beginning at Oldstone Church near Antrim. It is the closest thing the river has to a famous moment.
A private academy in Doagh, a grammar school in Ballyclare
Ballyclare High School
The school started in the 1890s as a private fee-paying academy in Doagh and was taken over in 1902 by Miss Catherine Aiken, who moved it to Ballyclare two years later. A new building went up on the Rashee Road in 1930 and the name was changed to Ballyclare High School in 1935. When Mr Russell became the school's third headmaster in 1939 his priority was establishing rugby, which he did in the early 1940s. Ten years later, on 20 May 1949, a meeting at the school chaired by Mr Russell — with some of his teaching staff and a number of past pupils — founded Ballyclare Rugby Football Club. The school and the club have run side by side ever since.
From Russell Park to Cloughan Lane
Ballyclare Rugby Club
Founded out of the High School in 1949, Ballyclare RFC played at Russell Park on the Doagh Road for the first four decades of its life. When that land was sold the club moved up Cloughan Lane, where the Old Ballyclarians built and paid for a new clubhouse, opened in 1992. It is one of the senior clubs in the Ulster Branch and the social heart of half the town on a Saturday afternoon between September and April.