Bronze Age, still in use
The Holestone
A mile north of the village, in a field on a low rocky outcrop, stands a five-foot block of whinstone with a hole pierced through it. The stone is reckoned Bronze Age. The hole is smooth and funnel-shaped, tapering inwards to about ten centimetres on the narrower side — wide enough for a woman's hand, not wide enough for a man's. Sometime in the early nineteenth century — the practice is traceable to about 1830 and is probably older — couples in the district started using the stone to promise marriage. The woman put her hand through; her man on the other side closed his around it; the troth was plighted. The Holestone outlived the chapels and the dissenters' meeting houses around it. It was never Christianised — there is no cross cut into it — and the church never quite managed to disapprove it out of existence. People still go up. Some still clasp hands. There is no plaque and no fee. Park considerately on the road and walk the lane.
Sixmilewater, the road, the mill
The valley and the village
The Sixmilewater river drains the Antrim hills west into Lough Neagh, and a string of villages — Doagh, Ballyclare, Templepatrick, Antrim — grew up along the valley road. Doagh is the smallest of them. In the nineteenth century it had a mill on the river, a corn market, two churches, a Sunday school that locals claimed (without firm evidence) was the first in Ireland, set up in 1770 on the site where the Methodist church was later built in 1844. The 1901 census put a little over five hundred people in Doagh and its townland; by 2001 it was 1,130; by 2021 it was 1,404. The village has grown into a Ballyclare commuter belt without losing the shape of a Sixmilewater village. The square is the square. The main street runs through. The river goes on to Lough Neagh.
United Irishmen and the Battle of Antrim
1798 in Doagh
South Antrim in the 1790s was United Irish country — Presbyterian, dissenting, republican, organised — and Doagh was deep inside it. When the rebellion finally broke in Ulster on 7 June 1798, men from the village were among the four thousand or so who came down out of the Antrim hills with Henry Joy McCracken to attack Antrim town. They were beaten by reinforcements. McCracken was hanged in Belfast a month later. The reprisals on the villages that had risen were severe; Doagh spent the opening years of the new century rebuilding what the army had broken on its way through. There is no monument to it in the village. The history is in the stones of the houses and in the names on the gravestones.