13th of July, every year
The Sham Fight
An Ordnance Survey memoir of 1838 already describes the custom as old. By 1836 over 5,000 people were taking part — not watching, taking part — and the mock battle was fought, then, across the top of the Newry Canal to stand in for the Boyne. The Royal Black Institution took it over and standardised it. Today two horsemen do the King William and King James roles, the fight runs to a script, William wins (he is contractually obliged to), and the crowd, which on a good year touches the tens of thousands, files back to the demesne for the speeches and the bands. It is the only Sham Fight of this kind left in Ireland. Bandon in west Cork used to have one. Half a dozen Ulster villages used to have one. Only Scarva kept it going.
A tree that did not grow up
King William's Chestnut
In June 1690 William of Orange's army camped between Loughbrickland and Scarva for the best part of a week, training before the march south to the Boyne. The story told in Scarva is that William rested beneath a Spanish chestnut on the lawn of what is now Scarva demesne — and that his horse trod on the young tree, so that instead of growing tall it spread sideways. The tree is still there. It is on the Northern Ireland Remarkable Trees register. The dating works: the tree is old enough. Whether the horse actually stood on it is a question for the kind of evening when nobody is in a hurry.
Newry Navigation, opened 1742
The first canal
The inland section of the Newry Canal was the first summit-level canal built in these islands — twenty years older than the Bridgewater in Manchester, the one the English textbooks usually start the story with. It was built to bring Tyrone coal down to the Irish Sea at Newry. It worked, after a fashion, for two centuries; the dock at Scarva unloaded coal for the linen mills of the Bann valley. The last commercial barge ran in the 1930s. The towpath is now a Sustrans cycle route. The water is full of swans and the occasional heron and not much else.
How a village gets built
The Reillys of Scarvagh House
Scarvagh House, the big Georgian three-sided pile behind the demesne wall, was built around 1717 by Myles Reilly. The Reilly family — Catholic gentry who somehow stayed Catholic gentry through the eighteenth century — laid out the village of Scarva in the decades that followed. The story locally is that an earlier John Reilly, in thanks for services to William's army in 1690, was given as much land as he could walk and plant with acorns in a day. He must have walked a long way. The family hosted the early Sham Fights on their own lawn. They still own the demesne.