The tower that fell in a storm
Sketrick
The tower house on Sketrick Island is a 15th-century build — the Annals of the Four Masters record its capture in 1470. Four storeys originally, with a boat bay cut into the base and a stone passage that ran under the bawn wall to a fresh-water spring. It stood mostly intact for four centuries and then half of it came down in a single storm in 1896. The spring passage was rediscovered in 1957 when somebody crawled into the right gap. You can walk around the ruin for nothing; the gulls and the lough do the rest of the talking.
The smuggler the restaurant is named for
Daft Eddy
The story W. G. Lyttle put down in a Victorian penny serial: Eddy was the illegitimate son of one of the Londonderry family across the lough, left on a doorstep on Mahee Island in 1842 and reared by a family called White for £50 a year. He grew up to run brandy and tobacco for the Strangford smugglers in a lugger that could thread the islands at night while the revenue cutters stayed wide. The locals called him daft because he was always out after dark with a lantern — if anyone asked what the light was, the answer was "It's only Daft Eddy". He died in a shoot-out in Newtownards and was buried in Tullynakill graveyard under a stone that said only "To Eddy". The restaurant has carried the name for decades and the lough outside the window does exactly what it did then.
Killinchy 1630–1637
John Livingstone
Livingstone came over from Scotland in 1630 and gathered a Presbyterian congregation at Killinchy. By 1634 the Church of Ireland bishops had silenced him for refusing to conform. In September 1636 he sailed for America with three other ministers on the Eagle Wing, leaving Groomsport across the lough — the first organised emigration of Ulster Presbyterians. Atlantic storms drove them back. Livingstone went on to a long ministry in Scotland and the Netherlands. Michael Bruce, his Killinchy successor in spirit, kept the congregation alive through the 1641 rebellion and the Cromwellian settlement, and is the reason the church on the hill exists at all.
Why the lough looks the way it does
The drowned drumlins
Strangford Lough is a flooded valley of drumlins — the small egg-shaped hills the last ice age left behind. When the sea came in, the tops became islands and the dips became channels. Sketrick is one of those drumlins. So is every little wooded hump you can see from the causeway. There are over seventy of them. At low tide some of them stop being islands. At high tide some of the causeways disappear. The map you have is wrong in a small way twice a day.