Do you remember the ‘Pill-Boxes’ on Or the Air-Raid Shelters? Landfill in abandoned quarries has been the favoured method of waste disposal about here for generations. What few abandoned granite quarries that remain are too small and indeed are now being further excavated so that housing can be built there – witness the permanent ‘woodpecker’ drilling beyond Quinn Bennett’s former home on Barley Lane, for example. My people, the Rodgers, originally came from You’ve heard of Tom Brown’s School Days. But have you heard of Kirk Ruddy’s School Days? Well, School day.. to be precise… Art Bennett was an important part of the Ulster cultural revival of the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century. By sheer chance, my friend Tom McKeown found the photocopied note reproduced below, among his papers, with nothing attached to indicate its origin or meaning. That does not stop us from speculating! When I was a youngster back home in Newry, a lot of enjoyment was spent on ‘The Rocks’ in Was it always sunny in days of yore? Or does it just seem so now we’re looking back from middle age? This is the famous Linen Hall Arch again, this time unspoiled with soldiers in the picture! The Pillars were a soccer team of Newry/Bessbrook some sixty years ago. Sadly the majority here have passed on. But still very much alive and the donor of the photograph, is Dickie Rodgers, third from the left at the back. Have another look at that panorama of Officials in the Library in Memphis ordered the removal from the Crib display there of some figures it had deemed (on ‘politically-correct’ grounds, we presume) inappropriate. Perhaps someone had objected to the deification of a child born out of wedlock, the public flaunting of his parents, the prominence offered to strangely-dressed travellers – perhaps illegal immigrants. The infant Jesus, his mother, St Joseph and the three Wise Men were taken away. There are Dervishes everywhere! We have already had a favourable reaction to the posting of that initial list from the 19th Century Directory. The following is the rest of ‘Gentry Etc’ from mid-nineteenth century Newry. It is sometimes revealing, always interesting to review lists of prominent townspeople from past ages – if merely to note who contemporaries were. The following is of ‘Gentry Etc’ from the mid-nineteenth century. At the suppression of the Killeavey Convent under Henry VIII in the 1540s – a Convent then believed to be under the authority of the Culdees – the lands were seized and allotted to one Marmaduke Whitchurch. He failed to prosper there but a daughter married Nicholas Seaver of Lusk, Pill-Boxes & Air-Raid Shelters
Armagh Road Quarry
Moving to Linenhall Square
Kirk Ruddy’s School Days
Art Bennett 1793-1879
Chapel Street Rocks
LinenHall Arch
The Pillars
Ballinalack Tunnel
No Room in the Crib
Gentry Directory:19th Century
19th Century Gentry
Seavers of Killeavey
