1575
The first fort
The English built the original Blackwater fort in 1575 under Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney, as part of the wider Tudor effort to push royal authority into Gaelic Ulster. The site was the great fording point on the river — the Irish name An Port Mór means the great fort — and whoever held it controlled the road from Armagh into Tyrone. The works were mostly an earthwork bastion on the east bank, with a stone tower on the west. A small garrison sat in it. For twenty years it held the line, more or less, until the line stopped holding.
16 February 1595
Art MacBaron's assault
On 16 February 1595 a Gaelic Irish force led by Art MacBaron O'Neill — half-brother of Hugh, Earl of Tyrone — attacked and captured the fort. The garrison was overpowered, the works burned. The crown had been pretending for months that Hugh O'Neill himself was not in arms against the queen; the storming of Blackwater fort ended the pretence. From that month the Nine Years' War was a fact, and the river crossing here was its first burned ground.
July 1597
Burgh rebuilds
Two years later, in mid-July 1597, the new Lord Deputy Thomas Burgh marched north with an army, drove the Irish off the river and built the fort up again on the same site. He didn't live long to enjoy it — Burgh died of fever at Newry in October the same year. The fort he rebuilt was the one the next war would turn on.
14 August 1598
The Yellow Ford
In June 1598 Hugh O'Neill closed in on Burgh's rebuilt fort and laid siege. The garrison was reduced to eating their horses. Henry Bagenal — Marshal of the Irish army, brother-in-law of O'Neill by Hugh's runaway marriage to Mabel Bagenal, and a man who hated him personally — pushed for command of the relief column. About four thousand men left Armagh at eight in the morning on 14 August in a formation a mile long. They got two miles up the road towards the fort. At the Yellow Ford on the river Callan, O'Neill's forces hit the strung-out column from front, flank and rear. Bagenal lifted his visor to see what was happening and was shot dead. Around twelve hundred to two thousand of his men were killed, wounded or captured. It was the worst defeat an English army ever suffered in Ireland. The fort surrendered four days later. The garrison was allowed to march out alive — a remarkable mercy, and a measure of O'Neill's confidence at the high tide of the war.
1841–1931
The canal years
The Ulster Canal opened in 1841, running from Lough Erne to Lough Neagh and crossing the Blackwater near Blackwatertown on its way down to Verner's Bridge and the lough. It was an engineering optimism that arrived a generation too late — the railway was already coming for it. The canal never made money, was abandoned in stages, and was formally closed in 1931. Stretches of bank and the line of the cut can still be picked out in the fields between here and Charlemont. The pleasure-boat revival schemes have been talked about for decades; none of them have got the diggers in yet.
Road bowling
Bullets on the road
The old sport of road bowling — known here as bullets — is still played along the back roads around Blackwatertown. Two players take turns throwing a small heavy iron ball along a set length of public road, the winner being the one who covers the course in fewer shots. It survives in only two pockets of Ireland — Armagh and a corner of west Cork — and the Armagh tradition is centred on country roads exactly like the ones running west out of the village. Sunday mornings, follow the crowd quietly. Don't park on a course.