Lecale Heritage Hub

Some great reviews for our first publication, Annals of Downpatrick...

Check them out here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/portal/customer-reviews/B0H5FFN62D/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_top?_encoding=UTF8&ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews

This and our second publication, Aynsworth Pilson's Recollections of the Eighteenth Century are both available via Amazon (see link in the comments) and are great stand-alone reads, or as the start of your collection of the history and heritage of Downpatrick and Lecale.

If your family held land in Ireland in the 1600s, there is a chance its name sits on a map made between 1656 and 1658. 🗺️ That was the Down Survey, carried out under the direction of Sir William Petty, and Trinity College Dublin's project describes it as "the first ever detailed land survey on a national scale anywhere in the world."

Its purpose was hard: to measure the land being forfeited by the Catholic Irish so it could be handed to Merchant Adventurers and English soldiers. The name comes from the way the work was done, with a chain "laid down and a scale made" across field after field. 📏

Today the surviving maps and records have been brought back together online at downsurvey.ie. You can browse county, barony, parish and townland, and search landowners by name as they stood in 1641 and in 1670. For a family historian, that can mean seeing who held your ancestors' townland before and after one of the biggest changes in Irish landholding. 🔎

Have you ever looked up your family's townland in an old map or survey, and what did you find there?

'Old McCartan', Strangford...

It's World Post Day! Today, we celebrate the significant role of postal services around the world, while also marking the anniversary of the establishment of the Universal Postal Union in 1874!✉️

This photograph comes from the Chichester Family Papers at PRONI and features a postman known as “Old Macartan.” The image was taken by Eva Chichester in Strangford, c.1910.

Old Macartan displays some identifiable features of a postman from the era, including a mail sack for carrying letters and a postal horn, which would have been used to announce the arrival of the post. 📯

Do you think we should bring back postal horns to let us know when our mail is arriving? 🤔📬

PRONI Ref: D4563/1/7/11

👏👍

Newcastle's 'Bendy Tree' has been crowned UK Tree of the Year 2026 - it took more than 30% of the national public vote: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c69wzr9qr7qro

The recently formed Loughinisland Heritage Group would like to extend their invitation to you, to attend their National Lottery Heritage Fund launch event...

You’re invited! This is your official invitation to our Friends of Loughinisland Heritage group launch! Will we see you there?

Thanks to the Mourne Observer / Down Recorder for their writeup on our latest publication.

fans

Newly-published essays capture life in Downpatrick over 100 years ago.
https://thedownrecorder.co.uk/2026/10/04/newly-published-essays-capture-life-in-downpatrick-over-100-years-ago/

The old 'Tech' building on Market Street, 1990s - what are your memories?

• Downpatrick Technical College
• East Down Institute of Further & Higher Education
• South Eastern Regional College (SERC)

DID YOU KNOW...
Michael Hordern's ancestors, the Sharrock's and Fisher's were from Downpatrick. His great great grandmother was Lady Margaret Murray (nee Sharrock), buried in Down Parish Church.

Remembering the late Actor, Michael Hordern (3 October 1911 – 2 May 1995)

A 1950s aerial photo of Market Street and Saul Street (Downpatrick). This is before the new opening of Saul Street onto Scotch Street and the rebuilding of the old Methodist Church at its junction.