Dargan slices the hill, 1834
The Cut
Newry Street climbed the hill so steeply that mail coaches from Belfast to Dublin had to be unhitched and the horses walked up separately — sometimes the coach was pushed by passengers. In 1834 the Marquess of Downshire paid William Dargan, the great Irish railway engineer, to cut a trench straight down through the middle of the street. The cutting is 4.5 metres deep at its lowest point. Downshire Bridge was thrown across the top of it so the upper town could still get to the lower town. Both halves of the trick — the road and the bridge — are still in daily use, and you can stand on one and watch lorries go under the other.
Born here, lost up there
Captain Crozier
Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was born in Banbridge in 1796, joined the Royal Navy at thirteen, and spent most of his life in polar ice — five Arctic expeditions and two Antarctic ones before he was forty-five. In 1845 he sailed as Sir John Franklin's second-in-command on HMS Terror, looking for the Northwest Passage. Both ships, Terror and Erebus, vanished. Inuit testimony placed Crozier leading the last survivors south across King William Island in 1848. His statue, by sculptor James Glen Wilson, went up on Church Square in 1862 with four polar bears around the base. The wreck of the Erebus was found in 2014, the Terror in 2016. Crozier himself has never been found.
Sculptor from Newry Road
F.E. McWilliam
Frederick Edward McWilliam was born in Banbridge in 1909, studied at the Slade in London, and became one of the most significant British sculptors of the twentieth century — Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, that company. His Women of Belfast series, made after the 1972 Abercorn bombing, is harrowing work. The F.E. McWilliam Gallery on the Newry Road opened in 2008, holds a permanent collection of his pieces and his reconstructed studio, and runs changing exhibitions in a modern building beside a sculpture garden. Free entry. Worth an hour.
How the town got rich
Linen and the bleach greens
Banbridge's nineteenth-century wealth came from linen. The fast-running Bann powered the bleach greens — fields where woven flax was laid out in the sun to whiten — and the surrounding parishes wove and spun on a scale that put Banbridge among the most productive linen districts in Ulster. The handloom weavers' cottages are still scattered through the countryside if you know what you're looking at. The big mills are mostly gone, converted, or quiet. The story is in the place names and the size of the older houses on the hill.