An 18th-century estate village
The borough of Smith
Smithborough is one of the made villages of Ulster - laid out deliberately rather than grown from a crossroads. It takes its name from a landowner called Smith, who established monthly fairs here in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The fairs were the point of the place: a market on a road between two bigger towns. By the time of Lewis in the 1830s the village had a Presbyterian meeting house in connection with the Seceding Synod, a dispensary, a constabulary police station and a school of around sixty children. Of all Smith's fairs, only the Whit-Monday fair for black cattle survived into living memory. The Irish name, Na Mullaí, the drumlin summits, is older and ignores Smith entirely.
c. 3500 BC, National Monument 367
Cairnbaine, the Tiredigan court tomb
In the townland of Tiredegan, a couple of kilometres south of the village, is a dual court tomb known locally as Cairnbaine and on the maps as the Tiredigan court tomb. Court cairns are the oldest megalithic monuments in Ireland, built from around 4000 BC; this one went up about 3500 BC. The trapezoidal cairn is thirty metres long and fifteen wide, with an exposed gallery, one roof slab still in place, and the remains of a stone facade and forecourt where the rituals happened. It is National Monument number 367. It is in a working field, it is not signposted to within an inch of its life, and you will likely have it to yourself.
A station that came and went
The Ulster Railway, 1863 to 1957
Smithborough got a railway station on 2 March 1863, on the Ulster Railway line that later became part of the Great Northern Railway. For nearly a century the village was a stop on a working line. The station and the line closed on 14 October 1957, a casualty of the partition-era cutting of cross-border routes and the general retreat of the Irish railways. The trains are long gone; the settlement stayed where it was.