Walking the Cassie cattle trail: 2. From the 'Resting Slap' to the Witchthorn

Leaving the Resting Slap with its views of Belfast Lough and Carrick Castle, the Cassie trail opens up from an overgrown path to a tractor-friendly country lane. My original intention, as promised in the last blog which covered my walk with Ray Cowan from the Beltoy Road to the Resting Slap, was to continue on down the Cassie past the Witchthorn as far as Porg Hill. Porg Hill is where the Poag family farm had been.

There are no Poags still living in Bellahill, but a Barry Poag had read this blog some time ago and wrote to me from Canada (where his grandfather Robert Poag had emigrated to, from here, in the early 1900s). Over the past year Barry has been corresponding with Ray and I regularly. He has shared a wealth of material from his own family and local history research. There will be much more of these Bellahill Poags when we do eventually reach Porg (or should it be Poag?) Hill. But first of all, Barry has sent some printed information on the Witchthorn - and this opens up a whole new story.


The excerpt is from a book on "The Forest Trees of Britain" published by the well-known English naturalist Rev. C A Johns in 1849. It was supplied to C A Johns "together with the annexed sketch", by the author's uncle, Alexander Johns of Carrickfergus, and it describes the Witch thorn at "Bellahill" on the estate of M. Dalway, Esq. The significance of this discovery for Barry Poag lay in the detail of the account, for Alexander Johns' informant was none other than Barry's great-great-great grandfather James Poag (who indeed states that he remembered the tree 70 years beforehand, that is, in the 1770s!):

"The schoolmaster of the Witch-Thorn National School (the tree has given its name to the place) referred me to an old man named James Poag, residing about a quarter of a mile from the spot. I found him at home, but gained little information; he is 87 years of age, a tailor by trade, and was busy at his work, three lads plying the needle with him; he said his sight was not so good as it had been, and his hearing rather dull! He invited me to take bread and butter and milk, all his house afforded, and told me he remembers the tree for 70 years, and that from his earliest recollection the trunk has always been as large as it is now. Within these few years some branches have been cut off, (a very rare occurrence indeed with an aged Thorn) which being reported to the agent of Mr Dalway, that gentleman went to the spot, and has taken steps to prevent a repitition of the act. The large trunk is 4 feet 2 inches in circumference, and the other 3 feet 6 inches; the thorn is about 20 feet high. It stands on high ground, and the father of the present proprietor told my informant that he had seen the Witch Thorn from the Scotch coast."

The map shows the section of the Cassie from the Resting Slap as far as Porg Hill and the Poag farms in Bellahill, and the sites of the Witchthorn and the Witchthorn National School. Neither of the 'witchthorn' sites survive, although Ray was able to point out the their sites from what he had been told.

Older maps show that the school was there in the 1830s, and it must have survived until the 1870s when the two 'new' Bellahill National Schools were built. These were located on 'proper' roads a t either end of the Cassie (the Beltoy Road, and the Dalway's Bawn Road).


The precise locations of the Witchthorn and the Witchthorn National School are both marked on this detail from an 1858 land valuation survey. A thick red line marks the townland boundary between Crossmary to the south and Bellahill (Ballyhill) to the north and east. Carrickfergus County (North-East Division) is to the west of the Copeland Water.

The thin red lines are farm boundaries - the farm at the top marked 10A is the Cowan home farm, and the one marked 21 bottom right is the 'original' Poag farm.

The Cassie runs across the top of the Cowan farm to the Resting Slap (which is where it meets the top 'point' of Crossmary townland) and then down past the Witchthorn along the townland boundary towards Porg Hill on the Poag farm. The Witchthorn therefore would have been a townland boundary marker before enclosure, not to mention a distant landmark for those on the cattle trail droving towards the 'Resting Slap'. It is fascinating that the 1849 account states that M. Dalway's father told James Poag that the tree could be seen from the 'Scotch coast'.

Alexander Johns had supplied an illustration of the Witchthorn along with his account, and this has to be an actual representation because he describes the tree as having two trunks, one 4 ft. 2 inches in circumference, and the other 3 ft. 6 inches. He also states that the tree was (in the 1840s) 20 ft. tall and that branches had been recently removed which he shows on the ground.
Alexander Johns was born in Cornwall in 1784, and was Ordnance store-keeper of Carrickfergus Castle from 1812. He died in the town in 1866 and was an accomplished illustrator, as his following sketches of Carrickfergus demonstrate. Indeed, he provided all of the original illustrations of local antiquities for Samuel M'Skimmin's "History and Antiquities of Carrickfergus" 

In the previous post I ended with a photo of Carrickfergus Castle viewed from the Resting Slap, and it fascinates me to think that this was the spot from which Alexander Johns sketched the Witchthorn, after eating a bread and butter 'piece' at James Poag's farm.

Another connection: the Johns' house in Carrickfergus in the 1860s was on the seafront at Joymount where the road leads to the Scotch Quarter, and on to Eden. This photo shows it on the left with a first-floor conservatory. The building (now demolished) was used to house Carrickfergus Technical School when my father was Principal there in the early 1950s.















Back at the Resting Slap, looking back towards Beltoy, is the overgrown path straight ahead that Roy and I had just walked before now proceeding on to Porg Hill. Here the beginning of the wider lane can be seen disappearing into the fields at both sides of the Resting Slap.















As soon as we turn round the corner, the Cassie opens out into a double-width lane, with the worn track only taking up less than half of the total width between the hedges.

And on the ground to the right are the sites of both the Witchthorn and the old Witchthorn National School.

It is not surprising that there is no sign of the school, but because of the superstition against interfering with a 'witch' thorn (the Ulster-Scottish equivalent of the Irish 'fairy' thorn) it is remarkable that nothing of the tree survives. The Scottish beliefs in Broonies (Brownies) and Pechts (Picts) operated here rather than Fairies and Danes. So it was witches, rather than fairies, that were supposed to dance and congregate at these trees - if not live under them! Witch trials were held in Carrickfergus, the most notable one being the trial of the 'Islandmagee Witches' in 1710 when 8 women from Islandmagee (the destination of the Cattle trail) were found guilty in what was to be the last witch trial in Ireland.

And so it's on down the Cassie towards Porg Hill ...

Walking the Cassie cattle trail: 1. From Beltoy to the 'Resting Slap'

As promised in the last posting, here is the first installment of the walk down the Cassie cattle trail with my re-united primary school friend, Ray Cowan.
We started at the Beltoy Road end of the Cassie, just beside Ray's 'home farm' where he lived when I last saw him (50 years ago). In the foreground of this photo of Ray (with the start of the Cassie behind him), is the Beltoy Road. This 'crossroad' is where the old cattle trail lane from Lough Mourne and the Commons meets the Beltoy Road before the cattle trail continues down the "Cassie" (Causeway) to Dalway's Bawn. This is the point I had got to before in my own explorations, as described in an earlier posting of 29/9/2101 "Along the Cattle Trail - in sight of Scotland".




A quick look at the map shows where we are about to start, marked in red - Beltoy Road. But before we even got going, Ray took me back to the ruined walls of his great grandmother's (Mary Moore) family farm at the end of the earlier section of the cattle trail coming down onto the Beltoy Road from Lough Mourne at Carnmanus - 1 David Moore (1860) on map.

We weren't long rambling round these ruins before the importance of this site to the whole cattle trail became obvious. The Beltoy Road between Eden to the south and Glenoe to the north is an ancient coach road, older than the cattle trail itself, and runs alongside the Copeland Water - the river that marks the boundary between the medieval County of Carrickfergus and the east Antrim lands granted in the 16th century to John Dalway of Dalway's Bawn and John Dobbs of Castle Dobbs.

This crossing point of the Cattle trail with Beltoy Road and the Copeland Water was the first significant "service station" for the drovers after the trek across the Commons from Ballynure, and the Moore farm here had paddocks, a circular "by-pass" lane to act as a passing place, and a frontage on the Copeland Water to water the beasts. It seems like this was an ideal stopping point for the drovers, and, just across the Beltoy Road on the Cassie, was a blacksmith's forge - 2. Blacksmith (William Greer, 1860) on map.

This photo shows the circular "by-pass" lane on the former Moore farm, looking back towards the site of the ruined stone house and outbuildings. The beech trees were planted on the Moore farm, but the belt of conifers that now covers the entire glen of the Copeland Water was planted by the Belfast Water Commissioners some time after 1870 when they bought out the entire Copeland Water river-course. This was done to 'sanitise' the land from farming 'pollution' along the water feed into the Copeland Reservoir that the Water Commissioners were about to construct at Marshallstown. And so the Moore farm was abandoned at that date.

This next view from the top of Carnmanus, looking down over the Beltoy 'glen' towards the fields on the Cowan farm in Bellahill, gives a good impression of how steep the slope was down to the Moore farm from that part of the Commons cattle trail.


Back to the start of the Cassie walk
So, back to where we started at the beginning of this post!












The Cassie is a wonderful country-lane walk, although a bit overgrown on this first stretch, with no sign of the old blacksmith's forge that once sat on the left-hand side.



The lane gets narrower as we go, so it is down to single-file!

I should say that it's not the lane that gets narrower, but that it has only been used as a single line 'pad' and the side hedges have encroached. Ray correctly predicts where there will be raspberry bushes among they blackberries - something he remembered from his childhood!




After a while we reach the first 'feature' of the walk: a sort of lane 'crossroads' - or rather a widening of the Cassie at a bend where two old redundant lane-ways join the Cassie.













Looking back from this point back down the path we had just come up, the line of conifers can be seen back on the far side of the Beltoy Road, where the Moore farm was. The new gate in the front right of the above photo blocks off another overgrown lane that leads to the farm that was the 'original' Cowan farm (marked as "3. John Cowan, 1860" on the map at the start of this post). It is another story for another time, but tracing this lane on older maps, it does seem to continue across the Beltoy Road further north, and on towards the north end of the Commons. This may have been an alternative route for the cattle trail that came round the north end of Lough Mourne rather than the south end.


And on the other side of the Cassie, facing south, is another gate closing off the back lane to Ray's 'home' farm (marked as "3. Cowan Farm, (John Davison, 1860) on map). This is the farm mentioned in previous posts where I attended Ray's 7th birthday party. It was owned by John Davison in 1860, but was bought by Ray Cowan's father in the 1930s and is where Ray was raised.

[To connect the families on the 3 farms highlighted on the map, John Cowan's son (also John Cowan and who was therefore Ray's great grandfather) married Mary Moore (daughter of David Moore of Carnmanus) in Ballycarry Presbyterian church in 1859. One of the witnesses was William Davison (son of John Davison).]


Pressing on, then, towards the 'Resting Slap', the track is still quite overgrown - but that only adds to my own sense of anticipation and exploration.



















Then, another opening appears ahead where the Cassie has a well-worn surface, and we get to the Resting Slap.














Looking back from here (below right), the path we have come seems a long way from the trees on the skyline where we started.

The Resting Slap is an appropriate name for the feature that marks the end of this first stage of our journey. As you can see, there are a number of openings into adjoining fields at this point. The term 'slap' is defined in James Fenton's Ulster-Scots dictionary The Hamely Tongue as meaning "a gap in a hedge allowing the passage of cattle, machines, etc. (normally closed with a gate, strands of barbed wire, etc.)"
It is marked on our map "4. Resting Slap" and the name tells of the days when this was a passing and a resting place for livestock being driven along the Cassie place in both directions. It is likely that the main traffic from the coast up to this point consisted of imported Scottish horses destined for the horse fairs at Ballyclare and Ballynure, along with cattle and other livestock heading for summer grazing on the Commons. The other direction, of course, was mainly cattle heading for the major drove roads in south-west Scotland from Ballynure and further west in mid Antrim.


Through one of the 'slaps' here, Ray pointed out where there was a legend of buried treasure. So, with the whiff of other pieces of folklore including a 'witch thorn' round the corner, we had to take a break at this stopping point ourselves.










The fields beside the Resting Slap mark a change of gradient for the Cassie. From here on, it is a decidedly downslope journey towards Dalway's Bawn and the coast at Whitehead and Portmuck. Glimpses of the distant Scottish coast are a feature along this cattle trail from time to time ahead and to the left. But here on the right hand side of the Resting Slap, Belfast Lough and the County Down coast are visible for the first time.
This somewhat hazy detail from the last photo shows that the Resting Slap even overlooks Carrickfergus. The keep of Carrick castle (built in the 12th century), is silhouetted against the lough in the center of the shot. On many a clear day centuries ago, drovers must have paused to enjoy this sight.

The next stage of the walk takes in even more surprises, and I still can't believe how fortunate I was to meet up again with the one person (Ray) who knows first-hand the history of the fields, farms and families along the Cassie.

Next, on our journey comes the Witchthorn and the site of the 'Witchthorn National School' right in the middle of the Cassie ... (coming soon!)