The big church before the village
Whitechurch
Half a mile up the Dunover Road there is a graveyard with the ruins of a 13th-century church called Whitechurch — Alba Ecclesia in the Latin, sometimes translated as 'White Church' and sometimes as 'Scots Church'. When it was built it was one of the biggest churches in County Down. A new parish church was built at Balligan in 1704 and Whitechurch was left to the graves. The Anglo-Norman coffin lids of the founders are still in there if you know what to look for.
The 1798 men of Ballywalter
Pike Sunday
On 10 June 1798 — 'Pike Sunday' — a force of United Irishmen from Bangor, Donaghadee, Greyabbey and Ballywalter marched on Newtownards and were met with musket fire from the market house. Nine men from Ballywalter were killed; thirteen came home wounded. For a village this size, it was a generation. The Freeman's Journal printed the count in August as a warning. Hugh and David Maxwell are buried at Whitechurch under a stone that does not mince words: 'They fell in an attack made on the town of Newtownards the 10th June 1798.'
The Mulholland linen money
Springvale to Ballywalter Park
In 1846 Andrew Mulholland — Lord Mayor of Belfast, owner with his brothers of the York Street Flax Spinning Company, then the largest linen mill in the world — bought a plain two-storey Georgian house called Springvale and 270 acres for £23,500. He decided it was not grand enough and brought Charles Lanyon out from Belfast to make it grander. Lanyon built the bow wings, then came back and added the domed conservatory. Mulholland's son John, the 1st Baron Dunleath, joined it to the house with a billiard room. The same family is still in it. They planted 41,000 trees and shrubs around it on the way. They are mostly still standing too.
Where the rebels hid
The Long Rock
After the rising failed, local memory has it that some of the Ballywalter men who escaped capture spent days at sea hiding behind the Long Rock — the reef that runs north-east off the harbour and that the sea anglers still fish over. It is also the rock that gives the harbour its tricky approach and the pier its better mackerel. The story may be embellished. The rock is real, the rebellion is real, and the willingness to row out and wait is the kind of decision a coastal village remembers.