Why a Belfast-born poet is buried here
MacNeice in the churchyard
Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, raised in the rectory at Carrickfergus where his father was Church of Ireland rector, educated at Marlborough and Oxford, and lived most of his adult life in London. He died there on 3 September 1963 of pneumonia caught recording radio sound effects in a cave in Yorkshire. The reason he is buried in Carrowdore, of all places, is his mother. Elizabeth 'Lily' Clesham was from Ballymaconry in Connemara, and the Clesham family plot was here at Christ Church. She was admitted to a Dublin nursing home in 1913 when Louis was five and died of tuberculosis in December 1914; he never saw her again. His ashes were laid in her grave, beside his maternal grandfather Martin Clesham. His sister Elizabeth and his second wife Hedli were later buried with them. It is a small plot for a large body of work.
The pilgrimage that made a poem
Mahon's elegy
In 1965 the young Derek Mahon, then twenty-three, drove out from Belfast to Carrowdore with Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley to visit MacNeice's grave. They were the next generation of Northern Irish poets and MacNeice was their inheritance. Mahon went home and wrote 'In Carrowdore Churchyard', which opens 'Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground, / However the wind tugs, the headstones shake' and closes with the famous Euripidean image of a blackbird and a phrase. It is a working ars poetica disguised as a graveside lyric. If you stand at the stone with the poem on your phone, do not be surprised if the wind picks up.
A motorbike race in the road outside the village
The Carrowdore 100
From 1927 the Carrowdore 100 ran a 5.5-mile road circuit on the Greyabbey-to-Millisle Road just outside the village — closed-road racing on the actual peninsula tarmac, the way they still do it at Cookstown and Tandragee and the North West. Joey Dunlop won the meeting eight times in the 1980s and 1990s, more than anyone else. The race kept going through every change in motorcycle racing safety culture until the death of rider Eddie Sinton in 2000 brought it to an end. There is a c.1960 short documentary, 'The Carrowdore 100', on the BFI player if you want to see the village as it was when the engines were running through it.
A Huguenot family in a Norman peninsula
The Crommelins
Carrowdore Castle, behind its trees a quarter-mile west of the village, was built in 1818-20 by Nicholas de La Cherois-Crommelin. The Crommelins were French Huguenots who fled persecution to Holland in the 17th century. Louis Crommelin was personally invited by William III in 1698 to lead a colony of seventy linen-weaving families to Lisburn — the start of the Ulster linen industry. The de la Cherois brothers fought for William at the Boyne. Two refugee families, one castle, two centuries of peninsula gentry. May Crommelin, a successful Victorian novelist and travel writer, was born in the castle in 1849. Christ Church itself was built on land given by Nicholas Crommelin and paid for by Lord John George Beresford; the nave opened in 1843, the spire was added in 1859.
A school that grew out of a 1996 public meeting
Strangford Integrated College
Strangford Integrated College on the Abbey Road opened on 1 September 1997 with sixty-four pupils, six full-time staff and a school secretary. It came out of a 1996 public meeting called by All Children Together — the parents' movement that built Northern Ireland's integrated schools sector from the ground up, deliberately mixing Catholic and Protestant children in the same classrooms in a place where that was still political. Grant-maintained status came through in 1999. The college is now the largest single employer in the village and a reason a lot of young families end up here.