How the abbey got here
Affreca's vow
Affreca of the Isles — daughter of Godred, King of Man, and wife of the Anglo-Norman warlord John de Courcy — founded Grey Abbey in 1193 in thanks for a safe sea crossing. She brought monks from Holm Cultram in Cumbria. The lancet arches she paid for are among the earliest Gothic in Ireland and the earliest surviving in what is now Northern Ireland. The abbey was dissolved in 1541 and burnt out by Brian O'Neill's men in 1572, and the walls have been roofless ever since.
The minister they hanged
James Porter
James Porter was the Presbyterian minister of Greyabbey from 1787 and one of the sharpest pens behind the United Irishmen's newspaper, the Northern Star — his satire 'Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand' did real damage to the local gentry. He was arrested in June 1798 on the thin charge of having been present when rebels read an intercepted military despatch. The court-martial at Newtownards convicted him anyway. They hanged him on 2 July 1798 on a green knoll within sight of both his meeting-house and his own front door. His wife was with him at the gallows. He is buried in the abbey churchyard in the village.
How the gardens at Mount Stewart got their faces
Edith and the Dodo Terrace
Edith Chaplin, 7th Marchioness of Londonderry, came to Mount Stewart in the 1910s and spent the next forty years turning the grounds into one of the great gardens of the British Isles — Italian, Spanish, sunken and shamrock parterres, all built around the unlikely warm microclimate of Strangford Lough. The Dodo Terrace, with its stone menagerie of frogs, monkeys and dodos, is a private joke about her wartime political dining club, the Ark, where every member had an animal nickname. Winston Churchill was a Warlock. Edith herself was Circe.
A village that runs on other people’s attics
The seventeen shops
Sometime in the 1980s a few dealers set up in old cottages along Main Street, and other dealers followed because dealers always do, and Greyabbey acquired the only honest claim of its kind in Ireland: the densest cluster of antique shops in any village in the country. Hoops Courtyard, reached through an arched gateway off the main street, is the heart of it. The shops open and close on their own logic. The collective hours are Wednesday to Saturday. Sundays and Mondays the village goes quiet again.