The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.
Pott Shrigley, Cheshire, 1824
John Martin and the model village
Martin was a Belfast cotton manufacturer who took the name of his family's home village in Cheshire and gave it to the land he bought above the Dibney River. He built a six-storey mill in 1824 and laid out the village around it in the early-industrial model: planned housing, a school, a village hall, recreational ground, a Co-op shop where workers spent the tokens they were paid in. By 1836 the mill had more power looms than any other factory in Ireland. The mill burned down in 1845, the year the Famine began, and Martin's son rebuilt it for flax spinning rather than cotton. The family stayed paternalistic landlords for two generations.
Public subscription, 1871
The clock tower
While Martin was still alive, the district decided to commemorate him. A design competition was held in 1870 for a clock tower and drinking fountain at the crossroads outside the mill gate. The winning High Victorian design was executed in 1871 — an octagonal arcade of round-headed arches around a central shaft, the drinking fountain inside, a square tower above supported by flying buttresses, triple pointed openings on each face, large circular oculi holding the four clock faces. It is the only listed structure of any consequence for a mile and it has outlived the mill, the cottages, the tannery and the founder by a long way.
The whistle and the nine years
Hallowe'en night, 1930
The flax spinning mill closed on Hallowe'en night 1930. Wages stopped overnight. There was no other employer for miles. What followed is remembered in the village as nine years of severe hardship and outright hunger — a slow-motion famine on the Down coast in the 1930s that has almost no presence in the national story. People emigrated. The Martin Co-op shop closed. The school's numbers fell. The village, for the best part of a decade, was a planned settlement with no plan.
A leather works and a rescue mission
United Chrome Tanners
Alfred and Isaac Utitz, with Walter Weiniger, were Czech Jews who saw the way the 1930s were going and got out. They set up United Chrome Tanners on the Shrigley mill site in the late 1930s — and the work permits they raised for staff doubled as a way to get other Jewish families out of central Europe. Nicholas Vermes, one of the last Hungarian Jews to escape, made a six-day trek across occupied Europe on the strength of a Shrigley work permit. Mr Horenovsky, another Czech Jew, was the first managing director. By November 1939, ninety people worked at the tannery. By the early 1970s it was over five hundred and the company held a Queen's Award for Export. There is a plaque in the village.
The Kindertransport farm on the Ards
Millisle, twenty miles north
The Shrigley tannery was not the only refuge of its kind on this coast. From 1938 to 1948 a working farm at Millisle, twenty miles north on the Ards Peninsula, housed several hundred Jewish children evacuated from Germany and Austria on the Kindertransport, together with adult refugees and older members of religious Zionist youth groups. The two stories — the tannery here and the farm up there — are usually told separately. They were happening in the same county, in the same years, for the same reason.
What got knocked down
The 1968 redevelopment
Between 1968 and 1972, the Downpatrick Area Plan replaced the entire early-industrial village. The Victorian workers' cottages came down. The Co-op shop went. In their place: 154 new houses and two shops, built in the suburban style of the time, arranged around the streets where Martin's cottages had been. The clock tower stayed. The green stayed. The mill chimney did not. What you walk through today is almost entirely 1970s housing with a Victorian monument in the middle of it, and you have to know what was there to feel what is missing.
A council sale, a community campaign
The green, 2024
In 2024, Newry, Mourne and Down Council listed the village green as surplus to requirements and moved to sell it. The Shrigley Community Group ran a campaign, the residents turned out, and the sale was unanimously dropped. A councillor pointed out — possibly to the council's surprise — that a deed of covenant required the land to be retained as open recreational space in any case. The green that Martin's plan laid out in 1824 is, for now, still the village's.