1619, and the men inside it
John Hamilton's bawn
John Hamilton (c. 1568–1639) was a younger brother of Sir James Hamilton, 1st Viscount Claneboye — one of the Scottish undertakers planted in Ulster after 1610. John got land in mid-Armagh and put up his bawn here in 1619. The 1622 plantation survey recorded it as lime-and-stone walls twelve feet high, ninety feet long by sixty-three broad, with two flankers. Hamilton had settled twenty to twenty-six families on the land and could field thirty armed men, as his plantation undertaking required. Eight years later the rebellion came. The bawn was destroyed in 1641.
Swift's barrack-or-malt-house joke
The grand question debated
Jonathan Swift came up from Dublin in 1728, 1729 and 1730 to stay with Sir Arthur and Lady Acheson at Market Hill. In 1729 he wrote a comic poem about the ruin of the bawn down the road — 'The Grand Question Debated: whether Hamilton's Bawn should be turn'd into a Barrack or a Malt-house'. It's a domestic argument in verse between Lady Acheson and her household about what to do with the wreck. The barrack side won the argument and won the actual decision: a barracks was built on the bawn's foundations in 1731, the same year Swift's poem first appeared in print.
1830s, by request
The barracks goes too
The barracks didn't last long either. By the 1830s a Mr James McRoberts, a grocer in the village, asked Lord Gosford for permission to let local inhabitants dismantle the barracks for stone — house-building, road repairs, the kind of practical reuse that empties a ruin in a season. Permission granted. The site is now a farm field on the eastern side of the B111 Mullaghbrack road heading south from the village towards Markethill. Two losses on the same square of ground — the bawn the village is named after, then the barrack a famous poem argued about. The name outlasted both.
Mullaghbrack parish, the same night
The 1641 rector
When the rebellion swept through mid-Armagh in October 1641, the parish churches of Mullaghbrack and Kilcluney were destroyed alongside the Achesons' castle at Markethill and Hamilton's bawn — the same night, the same fires. The rector of Mullaghbrack, Reverend Mercer, was killed; so was the rector of Loughgilly, Reverend Burns. The current St John's parish church at Mullaghbrack — a couple of miles south of the village — sits where that destroyed church stood. A list of its rectors runs from 1613 to the present: twenty-two of them, forty-four curates, four hundred years of names.