Newtownhamilton, says an old
copy of the Armagh County Guide, is named after its founder who in 1770
established a settlement here in the Fews
Mountains, following two
previous unsuccessful attempts in the neighbourhood. The COI Primate of adjacent Armagh
– if somewhat wanting in the
spiritual field he was still an effective temporal leader [he was responsible for
building the modern ecclesiastical city there] – in 1775 built and endowed the parish church. Locally mined lead was smelted in the village
until supplies of wood for firing became scarce. Cromwellian forces, it was recorded from the
century before (1645) encamped locally and were continually harried by Irish
troops.
The reference here to mining and to a growing scarcity
of wood for burning reminds us of two features of South Armagh little thought
of today – the great forests that until recent centuries cloaked the
countryside and the earth’s ores in the vicinity that are now all but
forgotten. There are wall maps in the County Museum
in Armagh’s Mall that describe the location
and the variety of mine-workings of old. Beside a 1926 photo of the Creggan mine shaft indicating an intensity of
production, there ia added an explanatory note to the effect that,
‘Silver, lead and copper were mined in the south of
the county during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until the mines were
abandoned in the early twentieth century when the lode was thought to be too
modest.’ (And am I not right in thinking I recently heard of
plans for gold mining in the vicinity?)
There is some correlation between mining and the loss of our forest
cover for some proportion of timber went for firing in the mines. More was felled for profit and most of the
timber exported (for building and ship-building, and industries such as
barrel-making in England
and elsewhere). The denuding of the
landscape was easily excused by the need to deny sanctuary to the local
raparees!
Today’s linear rows of non-native coniferous trees
cannot compare with the great forests of oak, ash, alder, birch and hazel that
once characterized The Fews – those forests that formerly provided a refuge for
the Gaelic clans forming a dense northern boundary with the English Pale. |
History 
