The collector
Hans Sloane
Born in a house on Frederick Street in 1660. Trained as a physician in London and Paris, sailed to Jamaica as doctor to the new governor in 1687, came home with eight hundred plant specimens and a recipe for cocoa mixed with milk and sugar. Spent the next sixty years collecting everything — manuscripts, coins, dried plants, antiquities, oddities — until he died in 1753 with 71,000 objects. His will bequeathed the lot to the nation. Parliament passed an act and the British Museum opened in 1759. The Natural History Museum and the British Library were carved out later. Sloane Square in Chelsea is named after him because he owned the land. The drinking chocolate, eventually, became Cadbury.
Four hundred years in one house
The Hamiltons
James Hamilton, a Scot, came over with the plantations under James I and got the country from Killyleagh to Bangor. He moved into the castle in 1625 and built the courtyard walls. The family have been there ever since — through the 1649 Cromwellian siege when General Monk sailed gunboats up the lough and blew the gatehouse, through the rebuild of 1666, through the Loire-Valley remodel by Sir Charles Lanyon in the 1850s, and through to the present occupant, Gawn Rowan Hamilton, who lives there now with his family. That is twelve generations in the same building. Almost no other castle in these islands can say it.
The mill village a mile inland
Shrigley
A mile north-west of Killyleagh is Shrigley, the satellite village that grew up around a six-storey cotton mill built by John Martin in 1824. By 1836 it had more power looms than any factory in Ireland. The mill closed on Hallowe'en night 1930 and the village starved for nine years until Jewish refugee families opened a tannery during the Second World War. The Victorian workers' cottages were demolished in the 1968 redevelopment. There is a clock tower in Martin's memory, put up in 1871 by public subscription. It is still there.
The tallest megalith in these islands
The Strangford Stone
In Delamont Country Park, a mile and a half south of the village, stands a single piece of Mourne granite twelve and a half metres tall — the tallest megalith in the British Isles. It was quarried as a 200-tonne block in 1999, trimmed to 47 tonnes, and pulled into place on the 26th of June that year by a thousand young people aged between fourteen and twenty. A flaw in the granite means it is technically two pieces, joined with three stainless steel dowels. It is the strangest thing on the Strangford shore and it is only twenty-six years old.