His first sermon, 1806, on Church Hill Road
Patrick Bronte at Drumballyroney
Patrick Brunty — anglicised at Cambridge to Bronte — was born on 17 March 1777 in a two-roomed cottage at Emdale, in the parish of Drumballyroney, a couple of miles south-west of Ballyroney village. He taught at Glascar Hill Presbyterian school as a teenager and at the Drumballyroney parish school beside the church on Church Hill Road. The rector, the Rev. Thomas Tighe — evangelical, Cambridge-educated, a fellow of Peterhouse — took him up, and Patrick sailed for St John's College, Cambridge, in 1802. He came home in 1806 newly ordained, and preached his first sermon in Drumballyroney Church on Church Hill Road. He left for Yorkshire shortly after and never came home. His three daughters wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The church and the schoolhouse, restored, are now the Bronte Homeland Interpretative Centre.
Born in Ballyroney in 1691, gave her name to the next village
Kate McKay
Kate McKay was born in Ballyroney in 1691. By the mid-eighteenth century she was living a few miles up the Bann, running the boarding house where the workmen building a new stone bridge over the river lodged during the construction. The workmen, by tradition, found her so good a landlady that they named the bridge in her honour. The hamlet that grew up around it took the bridge's name and is still called Katesbridge. There is no monument to Kate in Ballyroney. There is no statue and no plaque. There is just a place that her name left, and another that her name made, ten minutes apart on the B7.
A Norman motte rebuilt by the Justiciar of Ireland in 1248
Ballyroney Castle
The earthwork at Ballyroney is what is left of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle raised in the 12th century — one of the chain of mottes the Anglo-Normans threw up across south Down after the invasion to hold the country between the Bann and the Mournes. In 1248 it was rebuilt in stone by John FitzGeoffrey, Justiciar of Ireland under Henry III and a substantial Anglo-Norman lord with lands in Ireland, Wales and England. The stone castle did not last. There is no keep, no curtain wall, no readable masonry. There is a motte, a bailey, and the slight rise of ground that explains why a Norman lord wanted a watch here on the upper Bann. The site is on private farmland; read it from the road.
Banbridge to Ballyroney, 1880; extended to Castlewellan, 1906
The branch line
The Great Northern Railway opened the Banbridge–Ballyroney branch on 14 December 1880, with Ballyroney as the terminus. The station — a substantial stone building that survives as a private house — was the end of the line for twenty-six years. In 1906 the GNR pushed the line on to Castlewellan, where it met the Belfast and County Down Railway's branch from Newcastle. For half a century after, Ballyroney was a through station on the line between Banbridge and the sea at Newcastle. The whole branch closed on 2 May 1955 in one of the era's mass closures. The Newcastle–Castlewellan end is now a greenway. The Ballyroney section is half-grown-over hedge and embankment in the fields, readable if you know where to look. The station building is still there.