For those who search the past, the land itself remains the first archive, its fields and drains holding the record of lives once lived there.
Preface:
Before memory and after language, there is the earth. Her surface remembers the passing of generations, footpaths worn, drains straightened, hedges thickened by long care. In the lowlands of Ulster, where my ancestors once worked the soil, the land itself remains the truest archive. What endures is the shape of devotion written in ground and light.
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Silt gives beneath boots at Portmore’s edge. Each spring, gates sag on their hinges, need setting right, willow belts catching first light along ditches that barely held through winter. Here at Lough Neagh’s southeastern fringe, a spade handle worn smooth tells its own time; ash wood cut three fields over when David Lewsley guessed it would be needed right about now, the way these things are known.
The mass path runs narrow along the hedge where hawthorn grows thickest. Generations of feet wearing the track that avoids the main road, the Lewsleys among them, William reading at home while his parents Sarah Anne and David could not. Through stiles. Across wet corners. The altar stone waits in its hollow, blackthorn overhead, the wind caught there making its particular sound. These routes persist like field drains. Sunday mornings, the billhook clears what needs clearing. You can hear the blade working if you’re out early enough. Small adjustments for next week, next year.
Late February, 1851. Margaret McCann tests osier stems between thumb and finger, feeling for that give that says ready. Her hands know the work, a tambourer by trade, those same fingers that embroider fine garments now reading willow. Too early and the withies split rough. Too late and sap makes them sullen. The exact week reveals itself in how the rod springs back, in the clean break when she tests one against her knee. Her creels will carry that precision, that particular morning when frost still edged the willows but sun promised something softer by noon.
Turf smoke settles into wool, into walls, into the grain of everything. The door opens at Portmore Townland, wet reed entering with whoever checked the sheep. Bog myrtle crushed along field edges, its citrus-pine resin on cuffs, on apron corners, marking the morning’s path from Ballinderry Lower where the Lewsleys hold their ground.
Beyond the spring field, reedmace offers its calendar: shoots in earliest spring for those willing to wade cold shallows, pollen when summer heat makes the air thick, rhizomes when autumn water numbs ankles and you have to work fast. Chair seats woven from its leaves outlast the seasons of their making. From growth to use, a morning’s walk, the weight of bundled reeds familiar in Margaret’s arms before she marries William by mid-decade.
The drumlins of Magheradrool enforce their own order. Sarah McKee sometimes appears, perhaps visiting from Portmore. Roads bend to their will, drainage running in those tight arcs that make every journey feel longer than it is. Springs emerge faithful at their feet, marking where houses stand, where cattle paths converge. Rise, descend, rise again. The hedges grow denser here, hawthorn and blackthorn laid by men whose fathers’ hands guided theirs on the billhook.
Under morning frost, the land shows its bones. Atlantic communities carry wool-weight and salt-spray, but this inland shore breathes fresh water and linen. David Lewsley works his loom, one of many weavers in these townlands. Western fields run unbroken over blanket bog while these drumlins create pockets, each field contained, countable from its gate. Black basalt grit underfoot from Antrim’s plateau. Granite rubble pale from the Mournes.
July brings its particular anxieties. Hay watches the sky, and the sky watches back.
The whole parish turns rows at exact intervals, everyone reading clouds the way Sarah Anne did, knowing three days of steady sun makes the difference. Young Joseph and Bernard help their father William with the turning. The smell changes as grass becomes hay, green sharpness giving way to that dusty sweetness that will return in January when the haggard door opens.
Women once carried flax knowledge in their bodies, Sarah Anne among them, the pull and ripple of it. Weeks of retting when bundles lay submerged in bog holes, the water turning dark. Breaking and scutching that left lungs thick with dust, forearms burning. Now Lisburn’s mills have claimed the spinning but processing still clings to parish air. The rotation fixed: flax where potatoes grew last year, oats where flax grew, the ground remembering.
Along the Lagan’s tributaries, bleach greens spread. Women calculate sun and moisture with their eyes, understand which stones stay coolest through noon heat. Wet linen weighs different from dry. You feel it in the spine, in how bodies adjust their gait between green and beetle house. Margaret would know this weight, her tambour work requiring the same precision with cloth.
Among the hedgerows near Glenavy and Killead, children’s pockets grow heavy with hazelnuts, perhaps young David, gathering where his grandfather planted. The same hedge that gave May branches for the door. Sloes darken beyond bitterness, gin for Christmas Eve. Hazel for pegs. Ash for handles. Small wood feeding fires that never quite die, banked each night with hands that learned the motion from their mothers.
Dawn arrives across Lough Neagh in long pulls, setting reed beds into copper where old names still echo in the landscape. Field edges touched last. Evening won’t leave the shallows, caught in willow leaves until darkness claims the last reflection.
In the cottage at Portmore Townland, furniture speaks its local timber tongue. Ash for chair frames where it bends without breaking. The dresser holds its burden arranged just so. Each piece earning position through survival. Margaret dead at thirty-six; by harvest, William remarried to Catharine Kane, the dresser still holding the same plates.
A passage from a post on Lisburn.com reports:
The townland of Deerpark near Portmore Castle was kept stocked with deer and game for hunting and it was in this area a dramatic incident occurred around 1760.
“A huge oak tree was blown down;” explained Anne.
“The circumference of the tree was 42 feet and the lowest branch was 25 feet up from the ground.
‘It is said a single branch sold far £9, the stem for £97 while the main parts of the remainder were sold for £30 out of which was built a 40 ton ship.
“Many articles of furniture were made locally from this tree which was reputed to be 1400 years old.”
September, later that decade. Between labors, everything stills. A cry carries from the cottage, another Lewsley born, water still running beyond the wall.
An old man shows his grandson where spring water runs cleanest, likely Peter teaching what David showed him. Rock worn smooth by generations of bucket lips scraping. The boy’s hand feels the cold that means this spring won’t fail. Where water stays sweet. Where frost pockets first. Which corner floods in March but dries perfect for July. Each small understanding adds itself to the last, the way leaves become soil.
Most of these fields lie under Hertford’s estate at Killultagh, but here tenant-right still carries weight, work marking its own claim. That drained field, bog corner turned to oats. A properly laid hedge carries labor forward into other hands.
Someone will walk this path next year, next decade. The Lewsley boys will scatter. David to Los Angeles, Joseph to New Jersey, Peter to Scotland. But for now, in these middle years of the century, they’re here in the angle of evening light through sorted withies, in the smell when the door opens, turf smoke meeting wet reed.
In the soft give of earth at Portmore shore, spring announces itself the way it always has. Water moves through reed beds in patterns learned and relearned, willow roots spreading beneath, holding the bank against winter floods. The names remain in registers, but more truly in the angle of a field drain, the placement of a gate, the way morning light catches water at Ballinderry. Wind moves through sedge, through reed, making that sound like whispered conversation, like the shore talking to itself about seasons, about return.
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Historical landscape and material culture of the Portmore-Ballinderry-Glenavy region, mid-19th century Ulster.
Images: https://www.fishpal.com/ireland/ballinderry/ballinderryriver/
https://lisburn.com/churches/Lisburn-churches/ballinderry-parish-st-marys.html
https://townlandsofulster.com/2019/08/21/deer-park/
Church history: https://www.aghagallonandballinderryparish.ie/church/ballinderry/
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