A Boer War rifle range
1901
The barracks were built on the dunes in 1901 to train the Royal Irish Rifles and others for South Africa. Archaeologists who went over the site in 2017 found a full practice trench system, dug-outs, and a 600-metre rifle gallery still in the sand. The 36th Ulster Division drilled in those trenches from 1914 onward before shipping to France in September 1915. A lot of the men who went over the top on the first day of the Somme had stood in those exact ditches eighteen months before.
December 1920 – December 1921
The internment camp
The British opened Ballykinler as the first mass internment camp of the Irish War of Independence in December 1920. Over two thousand men from every county in Ireland were held inside the wire, often on no evidence beyond a suspicion. Three were shot dead by sentries — Patrick Sloan and Joseph Tormey from Westmeath on 17 January 1921, Tadhg Barry from Cork on 15 November 1921 — and five more died of malnutrition and exposure. The camp ran lectures, theatre, sport, and even printed its own cardboard currency. Everyone left on 9 December 1921, three days after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed.
The van bomb at the gate
1974
On 7 March 1974 the IRA drove a 300lb bomb in a van up to the perimeter of the barracks and detonated it. It destroyed the Sandes Soldiers' Home — a Christian rest house run for British troops since the Victorian era — and killed two soldiers asleep inside, Lance Corporal Alan Coughlan and Private Michael Swanick. It is the single worst day in the camp's century. The Sandes Home was never rebuilt.
Down GAA, 2024
The handover
The British Army closed Abercorn Barracks in 2018 and the 200-acre site sat empty for six years. In May 2024 Down GAA signed a lease with the Ministry of Defence to convert it into a county Centre of Excellence — four full-size pitches, three of them floodlit, a fitness studio, changing rooms, the lot. Planning came through. A unionist objection went up and was overturned. A GAA county board, in 2024, taking over what was an internment camp in 1920. Local people argue about whether that is healing, forgetting, or both at once. The pitches will be there either way.
Why the dunes are still here
The Russell line
Tyrella's dune system is one of the few intact stretches of mature dune left on the County Down coast — twenty-five hectares of marram and lyme grass running unbroken from the camp's eastern fence to the bay. It survives because the live firing range to the west kept people off the western half for a hundred years. The MOD's bullets, in their own roundabout way, saved a habitat. Conservation work since 2008 is now doing the rest.