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It is thirty-five years since I last re-visited the County Down. I took my son with me. He was nearly of the same age as I was myself when I lived in Ballymagenaghy, but I could only show him the site of Oiney Bannon's house. It was not the too common case of an eviction, for the Annesleys had the reputation of being tolerably good landlords.
Listening to her, I could almost fancy I could see my grandfather, Brian O'Loughlin, leaving his home with the other Ballymagenaghy men, with their pikes and such guns as they could muster, to join the United Irish forces previous to the battles of Saintfield and Ballinahinch.
Lying, as if nestling under the Mourne range, was a small, well-wooded hill, part of the domain of Lord Roden, who held high rank among the Orange ascendancy faction, and, as will be seen later, may be said to have held the lives and liberties of his Catholic fellow-countrymen in this district in his hands. In Ballymagenaghy I was oftener called by my mother's name than my father's.
At night, in my Irish mountain home, after I had prepared my Latin lessons for the following day, and my uncle, aunt, and cousins had left off work, I joined with great enjoyment in the family group around the turf fire, and listened with rapt attention to songs and stories; my favourite among the latter being the adventures of Barney Henvey among the fairies in the old rath, or "forth," as they called it, of Ballymagenaghy.
This almost necessitated the existence, as a kind of defence against Orangeism, of a body I used to hear them speaking of when I was a boy in Ballymagenaghy, called the "Thrashers," which, I imagine, must have been some kind of a secret society.
Here in Ballymagenaghy I had many practical illustrations of this in the way they treated the "poor man" or "poor woman" as they called them they never called them beggars who came to their doors.
She used to describe to me the attempts of an Orange procession to pass through Dolly's Brae, when she was a young girl, before she left Ireland. Dolly's Brae is a kind of rugged defile through which passes the road from the town of Castlewellan, which, running westward, divides the townlands of Ballymagenaghy and Ballymagrehan.
The last was a man of great learning. An edition of the Bible was published under his auspices by Sims and McIntyre, of Belfast. No boy could have had a better object lesson in the part of Irish history embracing the Plantation of Ulster than Ballymagenaghy.
This is a common experience in other Irish families. Many of the small holdings in Ballymagenaghy would not support in anything approaching to comfort the large families with which the sturdy and industrious people were blessed.
As often as not, in Ballymagenaghy there would be sung, to the accompaniment of fiddle, flute or clarionet, one of those stirring songs which, week after week, appeared about this time in the "Nation" from the pens of Thomas Davis, and the brilliant young men in O'Connell's movement known as the "Young Irelanders " songs "racy of the soil," like the "Nation" itself, which stirred the hearts of the Irish race like the blast of a trumpet, songs which are still sung by Irish Nationalists the world over.
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