Sweet Afton - by Chris Thile

(Thile is pronounced Thealey). This is a beautiful rendition of the Robert Burns classic, played in the Brig O Doon Hotel in Alloway, Ayrshire, I think in 2008:

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

(full poem available here on the BBC website)

If you have a spare £250,000, and then a few pound more for upkeep...

...then this could be the house for you. Ballyvester House outside Donaghadee is said to have been first established by a William Catherwood, one of Sir Hugh Montgomery's close associates, who was born in Lanark, Scotland around 1570 and settled at Ballyvester in 1606. Catherwood was also granted the nearby townland of Ballyfrenis by Montgomery that same year; in the later 1600s the Catherwoods styled themselves as “Lairds of Ballyvester”.

A more recent cultural connection for Ballyvester House is that this is where the family of Sir James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, lived for many generations. Craig's father was born here before relocating to Belfast where he became a whiskey millionaire.

The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1837 for Donaghadee parish said that “the dialect of the people is almost completely Scotch and they have altogether a great resemblance to their Scotch neighbours”. James Craig's grandfather (who died in 1868 and whose gravestone is in Donaghadee Parish Churchyard) would have been around at the time the Memoir was recorded.

So with family connections here it is no surprise that Sir James Craig is said to have overseen the famous gunning events at Donaghadee of 24/25 April 1914.

'True Blue Presbyterians - firm, plain and durable'

'...the men wore jerkins or coats made from home spun wool prepared for use by a fuller who had a "waulk mill". The colour employed when such cloth was dyed was generally blue. This may have given rise to the designation "true blue Presbyterians" especially among the Irish immigrants from Ulster where decent cloth was meant to be firm in texture, plain in aspect and durable in wear...'

- from Girvan 1668 - 1968

Boughey William Dolling Montgomery gravestone, Magheralin

Regular readers will know who BWD Montgomery is. Located his gravestone today at Magheralin when I was in the area.

Unplugged

Have had quite a few conversations with folk lately who have noticed that switching off the media is good for you. In America they've given this the name 'media fast'.

For most of my life here in Northern Ireland our airwaves and newspapers brought nothing but reports of murder and terrorism, to immeasurable effect. Thankfully that is (largely) over. Now however the coverage is dominated by (to steal a phrase someone used recently) the political, the public sector and the pointless. No matter what the subject matter (eg something truly life-altering like the shocking price of Jaffa Cakes) we are force-fed a stale format where we are given a Unionist view and a Nationalist view of everything*. This is usually followed by the latest public sector report exposé of yet another financial or competence flop (yet which mysteriously no-one seems to be held responsible for). And, then to lighten the mood occasionally, a bit of entertainment stuff like golf, rugby or Snow Patrol etc... before starting all over again with something political again, and so on.

One of the advantages of "social media" is that you can choose to avoid all of the above and just communicate with your friends or read what they're up to, and connect with like-minded folk. Some of it might be trivial, but at least in a sense it's relationship-building and contact-maintaining. I like catching up with people who I've maybe not seen in person for a while, for them to say "I read such-and-such on your blog..." which then kickstarts a conversation.

There's been much discussion lately about the death of newspapers and the upsurge of 'new media'. I think that this misses the point. If anything is dying it's people's appetite for being spoonfed the same old stuff by corporate media, and the upsurge is in being able to stay in touch with real people. 9 out of 10 cats still prefer authentic instead of contrived if they are given the choice.

> Try the 'National Day of Unplugging' here
> Try the 'Undo List' here

(There was a bit of a tangle here on a similar theme a few weeks ago).

*presumably the Unionist spokesperson would approve of Jaffa Cakes because of the orangey bit.

New DVD: "The Story of Ulster's Solemn League & Covenant" by Twelve Stones Media: £10.00 + £2.00 p&p

Nowadays people don't read much, usually because they can't be bothered. The printed page is not pored over as it was in previous generations - video is our medium of choice today. Even though they wouldn't read for an hour, people are more than happy to watch a screen for hours on end.

This new 1hr DVD - "The Story of Ulster's Solemn League & Covenant" takes the viewer through the 1800s and 1900s, from the Act of Union of 1801 right up to Ulster Day of 28 September 1912, explaining the events which shaped the hearts and minds of the 471,000 people who signed the Covenant that day.

Historical illustrations and photographs are interspersed with four interviews - Dr Fraser Agnew, Nelson McCausland MLA, Dr David Hume and myself. I must confess that the political complexity of the three Home Rule crises often makes me glaze over, but not this time, the story is told clearly without getting bogged down in obscurities. There are some fascinating insights into parts of the Ulster Covenant story which are often never told including how new Vatican policies of the time and public statements by Catholic church leaders confirmed to Ulster Protestants that their worst fears were not just hypothetical - 'Home Rule' would indeed be 'Rome Rule', as the slogan of the time warned. It also talks about Rev J B Armour, the pro-Home Rule Presbyterian minister, and of how land reform also played a part in the popular opinions of the time. A poignant story is of those Ulster people in counties Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, who signed the Covenant as a bond of solidarity but who found themselves abandoned when the border was drawn and Ireland was partitioned.

The parts which I contribute are relatively 'soft', (filmed at Donaghadee on a cold grey February morning) explaining something of the earlier Scottish Covenants, the 1644 Solemn League and Covenant in Ulster, the awareness of the Covenanters' in late 1800s and early 1900s Ulster, and of my great grandfather who signed the Ulster Covenant in Troon in Ayrshire.

I can't praise this DVD highly enough, and can thoroughly recommend it to anyone wanting to find out more about these emotive, historic times. I hope other 'professional' broadcast television producers can match the standard of high quality, informative content which has been set here.

> The DVD is available through the Twelve Stones Media eBay store for £10.00 + £2.00 postage and packing. Click here.

Settle bed - found one at long last

"...There was an oak settle standing beside the wall, a little removed from the window. Now a settle (Ah, but it is long since I have seen one!) is a long box-like arrangement with a high back, which opens out to form a bed, but which when closed makes a very comfortable seat or couch, and is, if of black oak as ours was, a handsome piece of furniture...

"Get in there," she said, "an' say yer prayers if iver ye prayed in yer life afore. Pray fur the hoose ye hae brocht intae peril, the lad whose feet are gaun doon tae daith, an' the auld wife whose pittin' her immortal soul in jeopardy fur yer sake. God hae mercy an' protect us a'."

I am sure Savage would sooner have faced the company of soldiers upon the road than that accusing countenance. He did not utter a word in reply, but did her bidding, and in another minute Alison and I had folded up the settle and stood looking at one another silently from either end..."

- from The Pikemen; A Romance of the Ards of Down by S R Keightley (1903)

Poems and Songs on Different Subjects by Andrew M'Kenzie of Dunover (Ballywalter), 1810

This rare collection of poems by Andrew M'Kenzie (1780 - 1839) is now available on GoogleBooks (click here) and also on the University of Ulster's Ulster Poetry Project (click here). There's not that much of Scots / Ulster-Scots vocabulary or language in it, but it's a very interesting look at life in a post-1798 Rebellion Ulster-Scots community.

Left: M'Kenzie looking a lot like Robert Burns. Published in 1810 by Alexander Mackay at the News Letter Office in Belfast, it is a collection of 28 poems and 18 songs. The Preface is a snapshot of M'Kenzie's life which he says had been 'too frequently hard wrung by the hard hand of poverty'. The huge subscribers list shows the geographical spread of readers M'Kenzie had, showing a huge following in his own backyard of the Ards and North Down but also reaching into Roughfort and Carnmoney in County Antrim (the home turf of the celebrated poet Samuel Thomson who had of course visited Robert Burns in Scotland), to Coalisland and Dundalk. There is a sizeable list of subscribers in Scotland... and Jamaica! There are still families of these surnames living in these same places today - I suspect that original editions of M'Kenzie's works may well have been passed down through the generations and might even still be on bookshelves or in roofspace treasure troves around the district.

In among the Ulster subscribers are the Allen family of Dunover (they owned a lot of land across the Ards Peninsula right up to the early 1900s, as well as the impressive estate at Mount Panther near Dundrum/Clough, which once attracted the attention of Donald Trump, but is still derelict and for sale). M'Kenzie seems to have been besotted with Eliza Allen...

'April in the Scottish Dialect' on page 83 paints a lovely rural scene and an appreciation of the changing seasons too often unnoticed nowadays. 'Lines written in a beautiful cottage built by Miss Montgomery of Greyabbey' on page 104 is of course a reference to the great Ulster-Scots Montgomery dynasty of the Ards. Other local 'big houses' mentioned are Springvale and Summerhill. But M'Kenzie also gets sharply political in his satire/attack on the gentry 'A Poor Man's Petition' on page 115, a piece he signs as 'Philip M'Clabber' and gives his address as 'Cabin Comfortless, near Ballywalter, December 18, 1807'.

His local 1798 Rebellion references are interesting too. On page 166 he gives the 'Epitaph engraven on the tombstone of two brothers who fell in the field of battle'; this is from the gravestone in Whitechurch to brothers Hugh and David Maxwell, who the inscription says 'fell in an attack made on the town of Newtown(ards) on the 10th June 1798'. The 'Epitaph' must have been written by M'Kenzie. Here's a photograph of the gravestone:



In the 'Notes' section he provides a moving account (either from local folk memory, or possibly M'Kenzie's own personal recollection) of the execution of Rev Archibald Warwick of Kircubbin in 1798.

• M'Kenzie was a friend of Robert Anderson, "the Cumberland Bard" who lived for many years at Carnmoney. Anderson wrote this poem for M'Kenzie, describing him as being 'gifted wi the saul o' Burns'. Here's an excerpt:

Hale be thy pipe, Dunover's Bard!
The day's at haun ye'll meet reward
For puir are ye, and times are hard
And claithin' dear;
But thousans mae will ye regard
Ere this neist year

• Here's a piece from the Belfast Monthly Magazine of 1810, written by a Maecenas of Broad-Island, giving some background on M'Kenzie's early attempts to recruit subscribers for his book.

• Finally, in 'The Poetical Works of William M'Comb' of Belfast, published in 1864, there appears a poem entitled 'To the Memory of Andrew M'Kenzie'. He had died in Belfast in 1839 and was buried in Shankill Graveyard. The inscription on the stone was also written by M'Comb, and reads:

‘Here lies beneath this little mound of earth
A child of genius and a man of worth;
The winds of heaven awoke his rustic lyre,
And tuneful nature breathed from every wire.
The world approved his song, but help denied,
He lived unaided and neglected died.’

I am not sure if M'Kenzie's gravestone is still in Shankill Graveyard.

Reformed University Fellowship / Indelible Grace: "The Hymn Sing - Live in Nashville" 2010 + "punk rock Calvinism"

Old hymns; refreshed arrangements; new tunes. A really strong example is Indelible Grace from Nashville, Tennessee. Plenty of you are going to love this stuff - their website is here.

........................................................................................................................

Trailer for "Roots and Wings" DVD



........................................................................................................................

General video explaining the background of Indelible Grace



........................................................................................................................

Indelible Grace: The Hymn Sing - Live in Nashville (released November 2010)
> Listen to the entire 18 track live recording FREE on Bandcamp: click here or use the player below. (NB The Bandcamp widget code is fixed to this width and won't let me make it wide enough for the song titles to be fully visible).



........................................................................................................................

Indelible Grace are working on a new album this year:



........................................................................................................................

Here is one of the band, Matthew Smith, doing an acoustic version of the modern classic 'In Christ Alone' (entire album on Bandcamp here) - the antique combination of guitar and subtle mandolin which when done well still sounds fresh today.



........................................................................................................................

The Reformed University Fellowship hymnbook is available online here.

........................................................................................................................

On the other hand, if you're into what this article calls 'Punk rock Calvinism' then the Mars Hill video might be just the ticket:

Portaferry water pump

Found this today, rusting and forgotten

Bap Kennedy "The Sailor's Revenge" (produced by Mark Knopfler)

Some lovely stuff on the forthcoming album from Bap Kennedy, Brian's (much more talented) brother

The Crowning Day is Coming

This old hymn (the tune of which was written by James McGranahan, a descendant of Ulster emigrants) seems appropriate for today's Diamond Jubilee celebrations here in the United Kingdom. The original words are here on Cyberhymnal. The tune was used by Ry Cooder in the soundtrack of the classic 1980 Western 'The Long Riders'; you can listen to it on YouTube clip below, from 1.43 - 3.15. Superb version.



One of Elizabeth II's predecessors, King James, was brought down a peg or two in the late 1500s by Andrew Melville. At that time James was (only) King of Scotland and had developed a high opinion of himself and his status - read M'Crie's account of their encounter here. Queen Elizabeth II seems to need no lesson is that regard. Here is an excerpt from the Queen's speech last Christmas:

"...Finding hope in adversity is one of the themes of Christmas. Jesus was born into a world full of fear. The angels came to frightened shepherds with hope in their voices: 'Fear not', they urged, 'we bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

'For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.'

Although we are capable of great acts of kindness, history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves - from our recklessness or our greed.

God sent into the world a unique person - neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.

Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God's love.

In the last verse of this beautiful carol, O Little Town Of Bethlehem, there's a prayer:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us we pray.
Cast out our sin
And enter in.
Be born in us today.

It is my prayer that on this Christmas day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord..."