by Wallace Clark - weaver, sailor and historian

Introduction Early Settlers Middle Ages Pre-Industrial Industrial Revolution 20th Century

Introduction

This is the story of a corner of Ireland that has been my home for over 70 years, and the home of my linen-making ancestors for eight generations. The tale begins on the slopes of the Carn. That's what we call Carntogher, the 1,500-foot mountain, with a distinctive nick in its outline, that your eye catches whenever you look westwards from Upperlands. Our community owes its life to a little, splashy stream that begins on the Carn's face, high up in the knee-deep heather. It winds its way eastward, along green glens, picking up tributaries until its grows into a 30-foot wide river, the Knockoneill - whose lower reaches we now call the river Clady.

About 10 miles downstream, the Knockoneill's peaty waters tumble over some dark rocks, around a half mile-long ridge. That pine-clad ridge, rising out of rushy bogs and hump-back fields, forms the center of Upperlands. And the river, whose gentle gradient happens to be exactly what's needed for driving a waterwheel, provides the reason why the ancient craft of linen-making has evolved into a world-renowned business.

For thousands of years before the dawn of the industrial revolution, the clean mountain water seems to have been one of the factors drawing people to this spot at the foot of the Sperrins. The Stone Age settlers who journeyed to Ireland nearly 10,000 years ago in skin-covered boats, not so long after the ice melted and the rising sea divided this island from Scotland, must have approached the Upperlands area by paddling up the fish-infested waters of the river Bann.

Early Settlers

Around 200 BC, our area was settled by warrior Celts, tall fair-skinned folk who originated from central Europe and imposed their Iron Age culture on the darker, indigenous inhabitants. And about 100 AD, a powerful Celtic chieftain built the huge circular fort of Dunglady, a mile east of modern Upperlands. (Dunglady is among the largest of the 40,000 round, hill-top settlements dating from ancient Irish times whose existence is known today. While there is no longer any sign of the fortifications themselves, the contours are clearly discernible from the shape and vegetation of the modern landscape. The term Dun means a fort, something more impressive than an ordinary rath, which was simply a farm and family stronghold. Both duns and raths are usually of a circular design which is uncommon outside Ireland. The smaller raths, about a hundred feet in diameter with a single ditch and a bank made from the upcast soil, were used mainly as a corral for cattle. Larger ones with two ditches and three embankments were community centers and places of refuge. But Dunglady, with three ditches and four ramparts, was both a fortress and residence for a provincial king. It is 330 feet in diameter and three acres in area with ramparts up to 15 feet high, making one of the finest earthworks in Northern Ireland. The presence of Dunglady, along with many smaller duns, raths, lake dwellings and chambered graves, would suggest that the Upperlands area was an exceptionally active one in pre-Celtic times.)

Middle Ages

From the slopes of Slemish, a round-topped mountain 20 miles east of Upperlands, the young Saint Patrick must have seen the smoke rising from Dunglady as he tended his livestock and dreamed of establishing in Ireland the Christian faith that was gaining acceptance in his birthplace, Romanised Britain. Local tradition holds that Saint Patrick baptized Saint Lurach, the founder of nearby Maghera.

Within 200 years, by the seventh century, one of the scores of monasteries which turned Ireland into a beacon of Christendom was established in the Upperlands area - on the river Grillagh, a mile or so north of its intersection with the Clady. Both the Monastery Grillagh religious community and the river seem to have taken their name from the first abbot, Laurence O'Crilly. But the golden age of Irish Christianity was soon overshadowed by the terror of invading Norsemen, greedy for monastic treasure.

Nearby Maghera, then known as Rathluirc from Saint Lurach, was raided and burned in 831. And a desperate act of revenge against the Norseman, a century later, led to the first mention of Dunglady in written history: a raid on a Viking camp by Donal and Flaherty O'Neill, sons of the chief of Dunglady and grandsons of an Irish King who had fallen in battle against the Danes. The two young men marched 10 miles up the frozen river Bann by moonlight and laid waste a Viking encampment on the shores of Lough Neagh.

The Upperlands area in those days was a small, marshy riverside clearing in the huge Glenconkein forest, whose thick growth of ash, oak and holly proved to be a useful refuge against future incursions: the Norman rulers of England who began subduing the east of Ireland in the 12th century, and the soldiers of Queen Elizabeth who made a more serious attempt in the late 1500s.

Chieftains like Shane O'Neill and Sorley Boy McDonald used the forest to play a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the English Queen's lieutenants, with both sides slaughtering thousands of cattle in raid and counter-raid. It wasn't only because of wars with the English that local cattle were killed. In 1585, Butler, the Earl of Ormonde came up from the south and drove off or slaughtered about three thousand of the beasts. He said it was to keep sustenance out of the hands of the invading Scots - but nobody seems to have asked local people whether they would prefer to keep the cattle and risk the Scots. When the great Irish chieftain Hugh O'Neill suffered his final defeat at Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland in 1605, he took refuge in the Glenconkein forest - before fleeing to France two years later.

Pre-Industrial

A map dated 1610 shows three settlers' houses sheltering behind the ancient defenses of Dunglady. The planters were slow to arrive in our district, but they cut down the oak, ash and pine trees at a rapid rate - partly for profit and partly to deny shelter to the Gaels, who staged a furious rising in 1641, forcing settlers to take temporary refuge in the town of Coleraine at the head of the Bann. As in the early days of European settlement in America, two races of hardy, resilient folk, divided by culture, speech and religion, veered between cruel warfare and uneasy coexistence. People changed sides and the dividing lines were often blurred: during the 1641 uprising, there were many stories of Gaels risking their own lives to save fugitive settlers from death.

By 1680, when our ancestor John Clark bought some land near the town of Maghera, and set up a corn and brewing business, the country seemed relatively peaceful. Yet within a decade, Ireland was once again engulfed by war, thanks to the contest between Protestants and Catholics for the English throne. Settlers holed up in the city of Derry, which endured one of the toughest sieges in our islands' history. Afterwards, the besieged and besiegers alike returned to blackened homesteads and ruined crops.

But it was shortly afterwards that linen started to play its vital role in Irish economic history. Parliament in London virtually barred imports of Irish wool - and began promoting Ireland's linen trade instead. That was why the gentle fall of the Knockoneill river, ideal for water power, became so important.

As well as the Clarks, there was one other local family which made a modest living during the early 1700s by finishing and bleaching linen: the Thomsons. One of them, Charles Thomson, became one of America's Founding Fathers, a Philadelphia revolutionary who penned the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. He spent the first nine years at Gorteade, the very spot where I have lived most of my life. His widowed father John Thomson sailed for America with his four sons in 1739, but died during the voyage. Like tens of thousands of other Scotch-Irish people around that time, the senior Thomson had come to the conclusion that the New World offered greater economic opportunity and freedom to practice his Presbyterian faith. The American colonies' growing prosperity and confidence had a happy side-effect for the old country - a steady increase in demand for Irish linen from places like Upperlands.

Industrial Revolution

It was Jackson who identified the perfect spot on the river for a water-driven "beetling engine" - a simple machine used to soften cloth by pounding it with wooden beams. That's what gave birth to our linen village. Around 1760, old Jackson's son Alexander Clark moved his residence from Maghera town to Upperlands, the site of his steadily growing business. He built a long, low thatched house overlooking the bleach green.

But personal sorrow, and the dramas of Irish history, were to cast their shadow over the life of Alex the seal-master. We call him by that name because he was respected enough in the trade to be authorized to "seal" or certify the quality of finished cloth.

In 1788, the seal-master's 25-year-old son Jackson fell off his horse and died after trying unsuccessfully to jump over a treacherous twist of the Grillagh River. We still wonder what prompted this skillful young horseman to attempt such an ill-advised leap; and our best guess is that he was distracted with worry about the blossoming friendship between his wife Jane, a general's daughter, and his good-looking older cousin, White Willie of Maghera.

In any case, Jane married Willie a year later. Alex was stunned by grief for his son and dreaded losing control of the business to Jane's family. This led to a quarrel between Alex and Jane's father, General Patterson - and eventually, according to family tradition, there was a a duel in which both parties fired but missed.

Jane's lively personality also played out on a wider stage - during the rebellion against the Ireland's administration which gathered strength during the the 1780s and culminated in the 1798 uprising by the United Irishmen.

Fired with enthusiasm by the revolutions in the United States and France, the Reverend John Glendy, a local Presbyterian minister, rallied support among his own flock and the Catholic community for the radical cause. Horsefall Jackson, before his death, and his father Alex were also sympathizers, at least in the early stages. Family tradition holds that when the army decided to arrest Glendy, Jane helped to spirit him over the mountains to safety by dressing him in female garb. The rebellious clergyman later escaped to America - and sent generous gifts to people like Jane who had helped him flee.

Horsefall Jackson sadly died too young to see his business ambitions or his political ideals put into practice. But his son Young Alex, only three at the time of the fatal accident, had the drive and passion that is often found among children who lose parents early. In 1815, he made a spectacular marriage to Sally Newport, the daughter of a wealthy banking family from Waterford in the south of Ireland. A few years later, he wrote a peppery letter to the Mercers, his landlords in London, threatening to take his linen-bleaching business elsewhere unless he was assured of their continued support. An inspector arrived from England and wrote a glowing report of the young Mr. Clark's thriving business, in which 50 people were employed to finish about 400,000 yards of linen per year - much of it the American market.

William Clark, the eldest son of "young Alex", was another long-lived Irish country gentleman with a flair for both sport and business and a twinkle in his eye. At the age of 38, he too married a wealthy Newport heiress, the 21-year-old Marianne. By the time of his wedding in 1853, he had become a familiar figure among garment-makers in England and built a dye house to meet their ever-growing demand for suiting material in black, gray and brown. He built his young bride a handsome Georgian mansion, Ampertaine, but his father never approved of his marriage.

William Clark's sons Alexander and Harry were both powerful characters whose contrasting personalities were a perfect foil to one other. Where Harry was headstrong and impetuous, Alexander was more cautious. In 1888, at the age of 18, Harry ran away, determined to seek his fortune in America or the colonies. But his father caught up with him in Liverpool and made a deal - he could go to America, but as a salesman for Upperlands linen. His trip was a brilliant success. Apart from booking hundreds of orders, he visited an Indian chief and went bear-hunting in Quebec, collected a bad debt in Chicago and inveigled his way into a White House reception where he shook hands with President Cleveland. Throughout his life, he retained a fierce affection for God's country, as he called the United States. His older brother Alexander, meanwhile, became a formidable expert on the Irish and English trade and the technical side of the beetling process. Harry, by contrast, was fascinated by water power and steam power - which he persuaded his cautious family to harness.

As Queen Victoria's reign drew to a a close, Upperlands was a busy place. Apart from the linen-finishing works, where about 200 were employed, there were three flax-scutching mills: Cunningham's on the Grillagh River, McAlary's and Lagan's on the Clady. The O'Loughlin family built carts and side-cars. And there was work for four blacksmiths, shoeing horses and fitting iron tyres on cartwheels.

Local success stories included the Diamond family. Charles Diamond, born at Gorteade, was editor of the Catholic Herald, while his cousin of the same name became Chief secretary of the Canadian-Pacific Railway.

Peter Henry (1780-1847) was a ship's doctor throughout the Napoleonic wars and then was among the physicians who tended Napoleon until his death on the island of St. Helena.

20th Century

Two world wars left their mark on Upperlands, but did not change its fundamental character. On each occasion, over 100 men joined up, and two dozen did not come back. The extraordinary strength of linen in relation to its weight gave it a new use on the wings of early aircraft. James Cassidy of Upperlands was among the 5,000 Ulstermen who died in the Battle of the Somme. During the second world war, eleven members of the Clark family joined the forces and two died on active service. Another local man, the publican Charlie O'Hara, had four sons serving in the armed forces. Back home in Upperlands, the dams were drained after German bombers flew low over them, apparently using them as a navigation mark. Part of the factory was turned over to making bullets. But wherever they were brought by the travails of war, soldiers from Upperlands never forgot their home. In 1941, when some Upperlands men visited my uncle Major Brian Clark in an army hospital in Cairo, a colonel in the next bed exclaimed: "What on earth sort of men are you? The young fellow next to me talks of nothing but Upperlands day and night, and the great men in it!"

Half a century on, Upperlands is still producing excellent linen, and a range of other textile products which have helped the business to survive at a time of bewildering changes in the fabric market. And as always, Upperlands people know how to play as well as work. Margaret Johnson is a world-class bowls champion, and Robert McHaffie ties trout and salmon flies that are prized by fishermen all over Europe. Smaller industrial enterprises have sprung up, like the ingenious engineering works powered by some of our old turbines and run by Willie McIlvenna. Maurice McNicholl, an Internet enthusiast, runs a small printing business. Ardtara Country House Hotel, the former residence of Harry Clark, accommodates visitors in the comfort and style of a bygone era - with all the modern conveniences.