51 Main Street, 1851
The tune nobody named
Jane Ross lived with her sisters at 51 Main Street and was in the habit of taking down tunes from passing musicians. One day in 1851 she heard a fiddler in the street, paid him two shillings for permission to write the air down and sent it to George Petrie's collection of Irish music, where it appeared in 1855 as 'a very old air' from County Londonderry. Sixty years later, in 1913, an English barrister called Frederic Weatherly fitted his lyric Danny Boy to it and the world took both. The blue plaque on the house has been there since.
William Massey, 1856–1925
A New Zealand prime minister
William Ferguson Massey was born in Limavady on 26 March 1856 to a Protestant farming family. The family emigrated to New Zealand in 1862; he stayed behind to finish school and followed in 1870. He went on to lead the Reform Party and serve as the 19th Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1912 to 1925 — through the First World War, the 1918 flu and the 1919 peace conference. He never lived in Limavady again, but Limavady never quite let him go: there's a bust at Stormont and a regular wreath.
Roe Valley industry
A river that did the work
The Roe drove the local economy for two centuries. Linen weavers stretched their cloth on the bleach greens to whiten in the sun; flax was retted in the river and dried in the watch-towered fields. In 1896 a German immigrant called J.J. Ritter installed water turbines in a Power House on the Roe and switched on the first hydroelectric supply in Northern Ireland. The mill buildings and the Power House are still there — the visitor centre at the Country Park tells the story properly.
Magilligan & the Foyle
Seven miles of beach
Twenty minutes north the land flattens into Magilligan Foreland — Ireland's largest coastal accumulation, a pile of sand the post-glacial sea pushed up over six thousand years. Magilligan Strand runs seven unbroken miles from the Martello tower at the point down to Downhill. The tower itself was built between 1812 and 1817 to watch for Napoleon. Across the mouth of the lough you can see Donegal; a small ferry runs to Greencastle in fifteen minutes.