A spring on a hillside
The source of the Lagan
Slieve Croob rises to 534 metres directly behind the village. On its northern slopes, in a bit of bog you would walk past without noticing, a spring rises. That spring is the River Lagan. It comes down through Dromara, through Dromore, through Lisburn, and finally through Belfast into the Lough. Stand at the source on a wet afternoon and the river is barely a trickle through the rushes. By Belfast it is carrying half the city. The whole journey starts here.
A coffin held high for 5,000 years
Legananny Dolmen
On the south-western slopes of Slieve Croob, in a field down a side road, three uprights hold up a long capstone. The capstone is ten feet by four feet by two feet. The legs are seven and a half feet tall. The whole thing has been balanced that way since the Neolithic — roughly five thousand years. It is a portal tomb, of the rare tripod kind, and it has been called a coffin held aloft by pallbearers ever since the first photographer arrived with a glass plate. The Department for Communities looks after it now. There is no visitor centre, no turnstile, and no fee. There is a sign and a footpath. That is the etiquette.
The climb that came back
Blaeberry Sunday
Slieve Croob was a Lughnasa hill — one of the high places climbed on the Celtic harvest festival in late July or early August. On the way up, locals picked blaeberries (bilberries) on the slopes, which is where the local name came from: Blaeberry Sunday, or Cairn Sunday for the stones carried up to add to the summit pile. The tradition went quiet in the 1950s and almost died. Community groups have brought it back in recent years with an organised annual walk. The bilberries grow on the same slopes they always did.
1306, 1641, 1811, 1896
The church on the ridge
Dromara — Droim Bearach, the ridge of heifers — has had a church recorded since 1306, when it appeared in the ecclesiastical taxation rolls as the Church of Drumberra. It was burned in the rising of 1641 and stood as a ruin for fifty years. Bishop Thomas Percy, the English antiquary turned Bishop of Dromore, rebuilt it in 1811. The chancel and transepts were added in 1896. St John's still sits on the Banbridge Road, paired with Garvaghy down the road, a working parish in a quiet diocese.