George Canning, 1827
The Prime Minister from Garvagh
James I granted the manor of Garvagh to the Canning family in 1618; they had arrived three years earlier as the Ironmongers' Company's agents. The line ran for two centuries quietly enough. Then in 1770 a Canning son — disinherited by his father for marrying badly and sent to London to read law — produced a child named George. That boy became Foreign Secretary, fought a duel with Castlereagh, and on 10 April 1827 replaced Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was dead of pneumonia on 8 August, 119 days into the job. Buried in Westminster Abbey. The shortest premiership in British history at that point, and the Garvagh family's high-water mark.
A private plantation that stuck
The Ironmongers' town
Garvagh wasn't the Mercers' — that was the Movanagher proportion further south, around Kilrea. Garvagh sat on the Ironmongers' Company lands, granted in the 1610 Plantation of Ulster. The Cannings of Foxcote in Warwickshire ran it as agents from 1615, built St Paul's parish church in the late seventeenth century, and laid the town out around it. They eventually bought the lands outright and held them for three centuries — one of the few plantation estates that never collapsed. The family left in 1920. Garvagh House on the demesne is gone — demolished in the twentieth century — and the walled garden, the woodland and the museum are what survive.
Two thousand objects, free in
Garvagh Museum
The museum sits in the walled garden of the old Canning house at 142a Main Street, run as a charity by local volunteers. The collection runs to nearly two thousand artefacts covering the Bann Valley from about 3000 BC to the mid-twentieth century — Neolithic flint, plantation-era documents, parish records, farm tools, a strong run on local domestic life. It opens seasonally and irregularly: summer afternoons, by appointment outside that. Admission is free. Phone before you drive.
26 July 1813
The Battle of Garvagh
The day before the July fair, around two hundred Catholic Ribbonmen marched on a Main Street tavern where the local Orange Lodge met, armed with sticks. The Protestants inside had muskets. One Ribbonman was killed and the rest were driven off. Small in scale, large in afterlife — the ballad "The Battle of Garvagh" passed into the standard Orange songbook and is sung still. As a snapshot of pre-Famine sectarian temperature in Ulster, it is about as honest as it gets.