Eanach Eilte · Co. Down
A drumlin crossroads with a medieval tower in the graveyard and the best dinner for miles.
Annahilt is a small drumlin village in north Down, sitting on the road between Hillsborough and Ballynahinch, seven and a half miles south of Lisburn. A thousand people, give or take. The 2021 census put it at 1,034. The village is essentially a crossroads with a primary school, a Scout Hall, an Orange Hall, a play park, and a hairdressers - and a graveyard up on the hill with a medieval tower still in it.
The age of the place is in the church. The Church of the Ascension on Glebe Road has been rebuilt three times that we can count - once in 1422, again in 1741, and the present building in 1856 - but the site is said to date back to an 8th-century foundation by Saint Molibba, the man who succeeded Saint Kevin as Bishop of Glendalough in 617 or 618. The only physical scrap of the medieval church is a tower in the graveyard, added on to the 1741 building by the Marquess of Downshire in 1768. It is the oldest stone in the village. Hardly anyone stops to look at it.
The reason a visitor turns off the Hillsborough road, almost always, is The Pheasant. The Patterson brothers - same family as The Plough on Hillsborough Square - have run it since 1998 in a Gothic-styled cottage three miles out from the village proper. Game from the Larchfield Estate next door. Stained glass and peat fires. Outside of that, Annahilt is a village to drive through, slowly, on the way somewhere else. That is not a complaint. It is the truth of the place.
