1598, the Nine Years' War
Lieutenant Poyntz takes the pass
Before there was a village there was a gap. Poyntzpass — known locally as Fenwick's Pass before the lieutenant arrived — was one of a handful of dry crossings through a 25-mile bog corridor between Lough Neagh and Carlingford Lough, on the road from English-held Newry into the country of the O'Neills and the Magennises. In 1598 Lieutenant Charles Poyntz, with a small detachment, held the pass against a far larger force sent down by Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, during the Nine Years' War. He was rewarded in 1610 with a grant of 200 acres in the townland of Brannock and by 1611 had built a bawn there — a 100-foot-square brick-and-lime enclosure with a house inside it and twenty-four cottages around it. He called the new settlement Acton, after his home village in Gloucestershire. The local name stayed with the pass.
Ten weeks before the Good Friday Agreement
The Railway Bar, 3 March 1998
On the evening of Tuesday 3 March 1998, two masked LVF gunmen walked into the Railway Bar in Poyntzpass, ordered the customers to the floor and shot dead Philip Allen, aged 34, and Damien Trainor, aged 25. Philip was a Protestant. Damien was a Catholic. They were lifelong friends. Damien was to have been best man at Philip's wedding to his fiancée Carol Magill, who he was due to set up house with in Banbridge. Two other customers were wounded. The killings, days into a fragile ceasefire and ten weeks before the Good Friday Agreement, registered across the island and into Downing Street and the White House — Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern both came to the village in the following days. Three men were eventually convicted; a fourth, suspected by his own side of being an informer, was murdered on remand in the Maze. The Allen and Trainor families have spoken at memorials together every year since. The Railway Bar still trades. The village does not pretend the date away.
Late 18th century
The village Mr Stewart built
The village you walk through today was laid out in the late 1700s by Thomas Alexander Stewart, a descendant of the Poyntz family who had inherited the estate. He set aside ground for Acton Parish Church (Church of Ireland), for a Roman Catholic chapel and for a Presbyterian meeting house, for a school, and for a market square — the square Petty Sessions sits on now. The monthly cattle and sheep fair on the first Saturday of every month became one of the biggest in this corner of Ulster. The market is long gone; the layout he set out is still the village.
A halt that wouldn't close
The least-used station in the North
Poyntzpass railway station opened on 6 January 1862 on the Great Northern line between Portadown and Newry. The Ulster Transport Authority closed it in 1965. Northern Ireland Railways reopened it in 1984 after local lobbying. It has been the least-used station on the Northern Ireland network for years — 1,730 boardings and alightings across the whole of 2024/25, which is about five people a day. It is unstaffed; you buy your ticket from the conductor on board. It is also one of the prettier short stations on the line, and it still works.