A thousand years of stump
The round tower
The Drumbo round tower — Cloigtheach Druim Bó in Irish — was built in the early medieval period as part of a monastery on the ridge above the Lagan. The lower ten and a bit metres survive, five metres in diameter, walls nearly one metre thick. The top half is gone; the level cap is a modern repair. At its original height of around twenty-four metres it would have been a beacon visible the length of the valley. It is mentioned in the Miscellaneous Irish Annals under the year 1130, when Conor son of Artgal MacLochlainn plundered the place, its tower, its oratory and its books. After the Anglo-Norman arrival the monastery was replaced by a parish church on the same ground; only foundations of that survive. The Presbyterian congregation built their own church alongside in the 1700s. The tower is a Scheduled Historic Monument and it sits, unflagged and free, in the graveyard. You can walk up to it any time the gate is open.
A bleach green into a damask factory
The Edenderry mill
Half a mile down the hill from the village, at Edenderry on the bank of the Lagan, the Russell family ran a bleach green from 1780 — laying out linen on the grass to bleach in the sun, the standard finishing stage for the Ulster cloth trade. By the 1830s they had built a flour mill on the river instead. In 1866 John Shaw Brown, a Lisburn linen manufacturer, bought the mill and converted it into a weaving factory — the St Ellen Works, eventually housing five hundred damask looms and employing four hundred people. Damask was the high end of the linen trade: figured table linen, heavy and reversible, the kind that went onto ocean liners and into hotels. Edenderry village was built around the mill for the workers. The works are gone; the village remains, with its own listed church and the bones of an industrial settlement attached to a farming parish.
A twelfth-century earthwork in Edenderry
The Norman motte
In the townland of Edenderry, between Drumbo village and the Lagan, there is a Norman motte — an earthen mound thrown up in the late twelfth century to take a wooden fort on top. The Normans built dozens of these across the north of Ireland in the decades after John de Courcy's invasion of Ulster in 1177. Most are now grassy bumps with sheep on them, and this one is no different. It overlooks the river. The fort that stood on it is long gone. The monks who built the round tower on the ridge above were already three centuries dead by then.
Belfast to Drumbo, slowly
Bus 13
Translink's Ulsterbus route 13 runs from Belfast to Drumbo via Newtownbreda and the Saintfield Road. It is the kind of country bus route that exists because someone has to get to a doctor's appointment, not because it is a tourist service — a handful of journeys a day, mostly weekday, the kind of timetable you check twice. If you do not drive, it is how you get here. If you do drive, it is a useful thing to know exists.