Hannyngton, Black, Stewart and Orr
The 1719 grant
On 18 May 1719, Captain William Hannyngton — of the local landowning Hannyngton family, formerly an army officer — granted in perpetuity to three named trustees, David Black, Archibald Stewart and John Orr, an acre and a half of land and half an acre of turf bog at a nominal rent, for the use of inhabitants of some townlands in the western part of Comber parish who were separating themselves into a new congregation. The first meeting house — a barn-like building — was completed in November of that year. A more substantial second building replaced it in 1770. That second building, much altered, is the church still standing on the site today. It is the oldest continuously-used structure in the village by more than a century, and it is the reason there is a village here at all.
Smethurst, Montgomery and the split of 1830
The Non-Subscribing controversy
The Synod of Ulster in the 1820s tore itself apart over whether ministers should be required to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith. The non-subscribing wing — broadly liberal, broadly Unitarian-leaning, led by Dr Henry Montgomery — was eventually driven out and formed the Remonstrant Synod of Ulster in 1830. Moneyreagh was one of only a handful of Synod of Ulster congregations to open its pulpit in 1821 to the visiting English Unitarian missionary John Smethurst — an act of doctrinal defiance that put it on the Non-Subscribing side of the split a decade before the split happened. The congregation went with Montgomery in 1830. In 1835 the Remonstrant Synod merged with the older Synod of Munster to form the Association of Irish Non-Subscribing Presbyterians, which is the body the church still belongs to today.
Robert Huddleston, 1814–1887
The Bard of Moneyrea
Robert Huddleston was born in Moneyreagh in 1814 and lived as a small farmer and handloom weaver here all his life. He wrote in the Ulster-Scots vernacular of the rhyming weaver tradition, called the language 'Ulster Irish' himself, and published two collections — Poems and Songs on Rural Subjects in 1844 and A Collection of Poems and Songs on Different Subjects in 1846. He left behind thousands more pages of poems, ballads, songs, novels and correspondence that never made it into print. He died on 15 February 1887, never famous, never wealthy, and is buried in the graveyard of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian church. The plaque on the wall went up in April 2014 for the bicentenary of his birth. His surviving papers — most of his life's work — are held at the Ulster Folk Museum in Cultra, fifteen minutes north on the Bangor road.
Five thousand in a field
The 1859 revival sermon
On a Sunday in late August 1859, at the height of the Ulster Awakening, the Reverend J. M. Killen of Comber preached in the open air on a field beside the Non-Subscribing meeting house at Moneyreagh. The Banner of Ulster on 3 September 1859 reported upwards of five thousand people present, listening for over two hours, with a great number of physical prostrations during the service. The 1859 revival was largely an Evangelical Presbyterian phenomenon and the Non-Subscribing congregation here was, on doctrine, the opposite end of the room. The five thousand turned up anyway. It was the largest gathering this village has ever held, before or since.
2009 to 2012
Rory McIlroy lived here
In 2009 Rory McIlroy bought a house on thirteen acres in Moneyreagh, with a custom-made practice facility and a scaled-down five-a-side football pitch. He sold the property in September 2012 and bought a place in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in December of the same year, settling on Jupiter Island soon after. He grew up in Holywood and the Holywood Golf Club is his home club; the Moneyreagh house was his early-career base. The locals do not point the property out. It is on the edge of the village and you would not know.