Born on the edge of the parish, taught down the road
Patrick Bronte at Emdale
Patrick Brunty — later anglicised at Cambridge to Bronte — was born on 17 March 1777 in a two-roomed thatched cabin at Emdale, on the southern edge of Annaclone. The eldest of ten children of Hugh Brunty, a Boyne-valley man working the linen trade in south Down, and Eleanor McClory of Drumballyroney, Patrick grew up walking the lanes between Annaclone, Drumballyroney and Glascar. The Emdale cottage sits across the parish line in Drumballyroney — a distinction that nineteenth-century antiquarians spent decades correcting — but the country is shared and the road past the birthplace is signed from Annaclone. The cottage is now a protected ruin; a commemorative plaque was unveiled at the site in 1956. You can see it from the road; you cannot go in.
Head teacher in his teens, dismissed for a romance with a pupil
Glascar Hill, his first school
Patrick had his first teaching post at Glascar Hill Presbyterian Church school, on the ridge above Annaclone toward Loughbrickland. He was made head teacher there while still in his teens — a measure of how unusual a scholar he was — and was eventually dismissed, the local story goes, for forming a romantic attachment with a pupil. He moved on to teach at the Drumballyroney parish school beside the church, was taken up by the Rev. Thomas Tighe — evangelical rector of Drumballyroney, sometime fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge — and through Tighe's influence won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, in 1802. He sailed at twenty-five and never came home. The schoolhouse on Glascar Hill that replaced the building he taught in dates from 1844; the original is gone.
Annaclone GAC, since 1896
Naomh Ann
Annaclone Gaelic Athletic Club — Naomh Ann, St Ann — was founded in 1896, two years after the Down county board itself was formed. The club plays intermediate football in the Down championship, fielding teams through the underage grades up to senior reserve, and has been the centre of parish life since long before the chapel got electricity. The home ground is Gaelic Park, up the hill from the village. The club has had its decades of strength and its decades of rebuilding, like every parish club in south Down; the last county intermediate honours were in 2008. The parish rivalries — Annaclone, Aghaderg, Tullylish, Saval — are old, sharp, and survive any change of personnel on the pitch.
Christianity here since around 510 AD
St Colman's, the parish patron
The Catholic parish of Annaclone — paired with neighbouring Magherally — takes St Colman as its patron, and traces a Christian presence in the townlands back to roughly 510 AD, when Colman of Dromore established his monastic seat a few miles north. The present St Colman's church on Monteith Road is a nineteenth-century building; the school beside it — St Colman's Primary School and All Saints' Nursery — has had a school on the site since 1866, with the current bright low building opened in 1971. The school takes the entire parish, a roughly three-mile radius of small farms and back lanes. About 190 children attend. That is most of the parish's primary-school-age children in one room of buildings.