9 June 1798
The Battle of Saintfield
It started the night before, when a rebel party went to the McKee house outside the village. The McKees were loyalists who had informed on Reverend Birch's United Irish branch the previous year. A fiddler called Orr got up the back wall with a ladder and set the thatch alight. Eight McKees died inside. The next morning Colonel Granville Stapylton marched out of Comber with 270 York Fencibles, the Newtownards Yeomanry cavalry and two light cannon. The rebels were waiting in the demesne woods south of the village — a hedge on one side of the road, rising ground on the other. They came down with pikes before the redcoats could form line. Stapylton got the cannon working and the canister and grapeshot did what canister and grapeshot do, but by then he'd lost three officers, five sergeants and the best part of fifty men, and he pulled back to Comber for the night. The rebels held Saintfield. A week later the same army crushed them at Ballynahinch and the village was burnt. The Memorial Garden on Main Street marks the dead on both sides.
The minister who founded the branch
Thomas Ledlie Birch
Birch was the Presbyterian minister of First Saintfield from 1776. In 1792 he convened the Saintfield branch of the Society of United Irishmen in his own church — Presbyterian radicalism was the engine of the 1798 rebellion in Down, not Catholic grievance. He survived the battle, was arrested, and eventually shipped to America, where he died a country minister in Pennsylvania. The church he preached in is still on Main Street. The building dates from 1777. The congregation goes back to 1658.
Two Moores and fifty years
Rowallane
The Reverend John Moore bought 507 acres of poor whinstone hillside in 1858 and started planting trees on it. He had no children. He left the place to his nephew Hugh Armytage Moore, who took possession in 1903 and spent the next fifty-one years turning it into one of the great gardens of these islands. Hugh travelled — or paid people to travel — and brought back seed from the great plant-hunting expeditions to China and the Himalaya. The walled garden, the rock garden carved out of the natural outcrop, the rhododendron wood — all his. He died in 1954. The Ulster Land Fund bought it the year after and handed it to the National Trust. The garden has been open ever since.
Why Belfast comes south on a Saturday
The antiques row
Three shops on the same fifty-yard stretch of Main Street — Agar at 92, David Flynn at 90, Attic in a unit at the same address. Furniture, ceramics, jewellery, light fittings, the occasional thing you didn't know you needed. All three are open Tuesday to Saturday, 11 to 5. People drive down from Belfast for a morning, do the three of them, eat in Saints, drive home. The shops have been there long enough that the dealers know each other's stock — if Agar hasn't got it, they'll tell you next door does.