The Drumballyroney schoolmaster who fathered three novelists
Patrick Brontë
Patrick Brontë — born Patrick Brunty on 17 March 1777 in a two-roomed cottage at Emdale in the parish of Drumballyroney — was the eldest of ten children of Hugh Brunty, a Boyne-valley man working the lime kilns and the linen trade in south Down, and Eleanor McClory of Drumballyroney. Patrick taught at the Glascar Presbyterian school down the road as a teenager, then at the Drumballyroney parish school beside the church. He preached his first sermon in Drumballyroney Church on Church Hill Road. He sailed for St John's College, Cambridge, in 1802, anglicised the family name to Brontë, took Anglican orders, and ended up perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire. His daughters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The County Down half of the story stayed in County Down. The church, the schoolhouse and the family graveyard are still there, restored.
A Gaelic tower-house on the hilltop, taken down in the 1640s
The Magennis castle
The Magennises were the Gaelic lords of Iveagh, the great medieval lordship that covered most of south Down. They built a tower-house on the summit of the Rathfriland hill in the late sixteenth century — four storeys, stone-vaulted ground floor against fire, the seat of the chief. Art Roe Magennis was created Viscount Magennis of Iveagh by James I in 1623, but a generation later the family threw in with the 1641 rising and the Confederate cause. The Cromwellian and Restoration settlements broke them. The castle was battered down; the lands were granted to Alderman William Hawkins of London in 1668; Hawkins took the surviving stones and built them into the new town below. What is on the hill now is a field with foundations under it and a view that explains why anyone put a castle there in the first place.
A cattle market at the top of a 506-foot hill
The Diamond and the Friday market
Rathfriland was a planted market town from the 1660s, when Hawkins started laying out a square at the summit and streets running off it. The Friday cattle and butter market on the Diamond ran into the twentieth century — Bassett's Guide and Directory to County Down listed it in the 1880s as one of the substantial inland markets of south Down. The market shut decades ago, the cattle are sold at marts down off the hill, and the Diamond is a parking square with a war memorial on it. The shape of the place is the market town it was; the trade is gone.
Why the castle was here
The view from the top
From the top of the Rathfriland hill on a clear day you can see the Mournes lined up to the south, the rough back of Slieve Croob lifting north over the Dromara Hills, and the drumlin country rolling away east toward Strangford and west toward Slieve Gullion. It is not the highest hill in south Down — Slieve Croob is twice the height and the Mournes are higher again — but it is the one that sees everything. The Magennises did not pick it by accident, and nor did the planters who replaced them.