The history that lies deep in shadow of old Scrabo Hill

And while I may have been born and raised in the neighbouring town/city of Bangor (and now live less than five minutes from the hill, Scrabo has always given me that sense of “home”, indeed an old painting hung in the house that I grew up in.

I am grateful to C Douglas Deane, a regular columnist with the News Letter in the 1980s and the former Keeper of Natural Science at the Ulster Museum, for this fascinating history of old Scrabo Hill from August 1982.

Deane begins with words written in 1744 by Walter Harris (1686-1761) an Anglo-Irish historian and writer who wrote of “the great sandstone hill” with its “volcanic cap which broods high like a mountain over the town of Newtownards. Harris wrote: “The Hill of Scraba begins to rise about half a mile South of Newtown, and from its top a vast extended prospect. It is a fruitfull Hill and the Plowman’s Furrows are carried- up very near the summit...”

Deane continued his history of Scrabo Hill writes: “Although not much over 500 ft the hill of Scrabo, with its monumental tower pointing like a black finger into the sky, seems much higher. The name ‘Scraba’ or ‘Scrabac’ is from the Irish and means what it says, ‘a scraggy hill’, because of whins, heather, bramble, ferns and dense growths of birch and hazel, which clothe the steep sides of the old quarries and at one time also along the top.

“Yet there are people who would translate ‘Scrabo’ as the ‘sward of the cows’ and the evidence which exists of former habitations scattered about the top of the hill, as ‘booleying huts’ where local people pastured their cattle in summer, rather in the way the Deer’s Meadow in the Mournes was used.”

He added: “Recent research by that indefatigable expert and local historian E M Griffith shows that the hill of Scrabo, because of its dominance and natural protection, was occupied by people from late Neolithic times to the early Iron Age and indeed his research shows that there was a thriving community here for more than 1,000 years.

“People lived in huts and groups of huts, and left behind multiple evidence of their way of life, pottery, flint arrow heads, flat decorated axe-heads and more. Down to quite recent times there was, too, a great cairn, believed by Griffith to be a portal dolmen, where these ancient peoples buried their heroes or kings. Sometime in the 18th or 19th centuries the massive capstone became dislodged allowing the cavity to be filled with, small stones with which the dolmen was originally covered, and about 1854 the dolmen was destroyed.

“About this time, too, a fine hoard of Viking coins, minted in Dublin about the time of the Battle of Clontarf in 1015, was discovered hidden under some of the stones, one of the most important hoards of Viking coins ever found in Ireland. Further historical evidence of the lives of these early people were destroyed when a golf course was laid out in 1909.”

Moving forward some centuries Deane writes: “Not much is known about the human occupation of Scrabo Hill down the Middle Ages, but in the early 19th century before the famine period there was a fine clachan up here on the top, not far from the present site of the club house. The village ceased to exist at the turn of the century though Griffith remembers a photograph of one of the last inhabitants, ‘Molly’, sitting at the door of her cottage.

“William Montgomery, in his ‘Description of Ardes Barony, in the County of Down, 1683’, mentions that deer were kept on the hill and the area was ‘formerly and now intended for a deerpark’, and Griffith believes that the great rock-cored bank and dyke which surrounds much of the top of Scrabo Hill was a deer fence or boundary."

Perhaps the most obvious signs of Scrabo's past importance, wrote Deane, are the great raw gaps in the face of the hill, “the famous sandstone quarries which have been in use since Anglo-Norman times”.

He notes: “Today the quarry walls are brushed by a green growth of whin, heather and ferns and as I walked the old quarry floor two ravens barked their hoarse protest.”

Deane then explores the hill’s geology: “The whole of the hill of Scrabo is Triassic sandstone which is intruded by broad dykes of dolerite which have spread out in horizontal bands or sills in the sandstone and when the last glaciation removed the top layer of sandstone and left great erratic boulders like the Butterlump Stone on the shores of Strangford Lough, it exposed the dolerite which now outcrops the top of the hill and on which the Mount Stewart monument now stands.

“There has been some fairly recent cliff falls and perhaps it was dangerous to climb among the fallen rocks, but the sight of ripple marks in the sandstone made by wind and water and hardened by a desert sun millions of years ago, were wonderful just to feel and touch and the cracks in dry mud baked and hardened by the same sun, made this quarry a geologists’ paradise and a lesson in history.”

Meanwhile, two arched bridges, that I have often walked by myself, show that there was a small railway track down to the road, where the freestone blocks were loaded on to horse drawn vehicles.

Deane notes: “It seems strange that the quarry owners did not make use of the railway when it reached Newtownards to transport their stone, they still preferred the horse, that the quarry owners didn’t make use of the railway when it reached Newtownards to transport their stone, they still preferred the horse.”

He adds: “Many buildings in Ireland from the Albert Memorial and Presbyterian College in Belfast to Trinity College Library in Dublin, are built of Scrabo stone which some people considered was the equal of Portland stone, but durable it was not and later buildings such as the Central Library Buildings in Belfast were built by imported Scottish sandstone. Many buildings in Newtownards, from the Dominican Friary and Market Cross to the doorways of houses, are built of Scrabo sandstone.”