A snapshot of 1870s Antrim - but was the grinding poverty air-brushed out?

“AH, sure they don’t make them like that anymore,” my dear old granny would often purr, aiming a nostalgic eye at creaky old keepsake.

It is perfectly human to hark back to past times - to rue change brought by the ugly march of modernity and find solace instead in the ‘good old days’.

In 1874 an English scribe paid a visit, and while he was impressed by much of what he saw he was still saddened by changes to his version of ‘quaint, quiet old Antrim’.

Like many, he was drawn to the town’s big marquee names, but curiously shy of what life was really like for the people who called it home.

“Visit the ruins, and at night find comfortable quarters at a modest hostelry where a waiter in faded black and clouded white necktie was never seen - but where you may take your ease in a solidly comfortable way that smacks of the olden times,” he said.

And afterwards, why wouldn’t a keen fisherman take a stroll along the banks of the Sixmile?

“The sound of water greets you in Antrim town, and under an ancient bridge rushes the very ideal of a trout and salmon stream.”

Well, in theory anyway.

“Alas, through the progress of commerce and manufacture, the Sixmile Water has been ruined by the mills up stream and, as a favourite haunt of the finest salmon and modest trout, its glory has long since departed.

“Not many weeks ago the fish for miles - such few fish as were left - were borne down from the other manufactories on a current black as tar, and quite as unsavoury, dead and dying.

“The voracious pike and tempting trout floated in peace together.

“And as proof, of anything were wanted, the poisonous ingredients which had wrought all the mischief, even the eels which do not generally stick at a trifle, but prefer a half-decayed corpse to any other seasonable delicacy, passed by limp and lifeless in the melancholy position.

“A worthy youth, in that half Irish, half Scotch tone which you expect in Ulster, tells us that he can remember shovelling the trout out of the still pools by the bucket load...”

Some things, it seems, never change.

But others do, like the ‘exquisite’ castle which was still half a century from its date with the inferno that August day.

“The gardens and grounds, laid out in the Louis Quinze style, are reputed the finest in the province, and they must be indeed fine which surpass them,” our guide opined.

“There are thick woods and an abundance of game hereabouts. Here, even within half a mile of the county town, you put up a covey of birds, who will probably be less familiar with mankind in the course of another month.”

And then, of course, was the lough that lured generations of tourists to the town.

“An enthusiastic curate is being rowed off in one of the boats as we near the beach of Lough Neagh, making ready his spinning tackle.

“He might save himself the trouble, for the main river and the other streams that feed this vast sheet of fresh water have been terribly swollen with the recent rains, and the reverend disciple of Walton must go far from shore before he will get a chance of slaying either pike or trout.”

A group of fishermen sitting nearby apparently chose not to bother and were mending their nets instead - which was good news for our intrepid traveller who managed to hitch a life across the ‘jewel’ to Shane’s Castle.

“As we shoot through the water the fishermen dispel an illusion. The Lough has always been reputed a home of the Gillaroo, the thick gold-coloured strange trout found but in few waters and whose habits are fully described in the book of Erne, an old but most charming volume of Irish sporting.

“The helmsman - who is the patriarch of our crew - says he never caught but one Gillaroo, and his two comrades never saw one. The supposition is that the race has declined in Lough Neagh.

“To make amends for the disappointment we are, however, introduced to a finny stranger, a pretty little fish called the pullan, a fresh water herring of delicate flavour but used chiefly here as baits for night lines.

“It is not at all out of order to call the genteel fish a fresh water herring, but he is more compact than that delicious plebeian, and has a dash of the grayling about his silvery overcoat.

“It is great fun pulling in the eel lines, each of which is taut and troubled with a wriggling captive. In they come, one after another, protesting until the last line is drawn and there is very little short of half a hundred weight of such game in the basket.

“A big pike or salmon has broken out of one of the nets, but the other imprisons in its meshes two brace and a half of nice trout, that cut pink and firm as a salmon when dexterously tickled at table with an antique silver fish slice.”

And then the big house hoved into view.

“Shane’s Castle looks very weird as we up sail and run at express speed for its projecting grounds.

“The sun sinking rapidly over the western shore of the lough warms the hoary brown of the ruins and gilds the splendid wood behind, while the shadows seems to add a few extra turrets to the pile.”

Again, it was a spectacle which took the rover back to another age - to the time of the red hand.

“The chief of an invading expedition, so the story runs, approaching the shores of Ireland said that the follower who first touched the coveted territory should possess it.

“One man outwitted his fellows by chopping off his hand and hurling it on shore before the foremost boat could touch land.

“This was the founder of the Great Ulster chieftans, the O’Neills of the Redhand.

“The member of the family after whom the castle was named, Shane O’Neill, was a name known at the English Court. He of the red hand lorded it over the other chiefs; and in Queen Elizabeth’s time the reigning chieftain O’Neill was virtually King of Ulster.

“This was Shane O’Neill who, with a bodyguard of 600 soldiers and an army of 5,000 horse and foot, had many a brush with the English troops, made a journey with the armed retinue of an independent prince to London, and treated with the British maiden Queen.

“The days of the Red Hands are gone. The O’Neills no longer summon bodyguards of long, curled gallow glasses, armed with battleaxes, and attired in yellow vest, short tunics and shaggy cloaks to burn, kill and destroy.

“Shane’s descendants, Lord O’Neill, dwells undisturbed in his delightful park, and courteously allows the stranger to wander through the demesne, inspect the interesting ruins and capture the speckled trout in the river.

“Before re-entering our boat we are shown the remnants of a carved head, whose fall, it is said, will be simultaneous with the end of the ancient race.

“The Banshee of Shane’s Castle we did not hear, although its shriek denoting impending evil to an O’Neill is sometimes heard among the woods, upon the shore, along the ruined walls of falling castle, echoed by the vaults underneath and wailing through the nettle-covered graves of the departed.”

And then it was back to Antrim, with its ‘long, wide, clean main street’ before travelling on to Belfast through the countryside - and he reckoned there ‘is not a better high road in England’.

So there you have it - a snapshot of Antrim 152-years-ago.

But there is something ‘fishy’ about this scribe’s take on the town. Somehow it seems more interested in the life in the waterways than on the curiously empty streets.

When the piece was penned, an 11-year-old was living a very different existence at Pogue’s Entry. His was not a world of silver fish slices or wistful ruminations on his hometown’s past.

No, for Alexander Irvine life was a daily challenge.

When the article appeared he was selling newspapers. He was ‘hatless, shoeless and ragged’, but he was helping keep his family’s heads above water.

“The world in which I found myself was a world of hungry people,” Antrim’s most famous literary son wrote in his 1910.

“My earliest sufferings were the sufferings of hunger - physical hunger.

“It was not an unusual sight to see the children of our neighbourhood scratching the offal in the gutterways for scraps of meat, vegetables, and refuse. Many times I did so myself.”

In his home there were no chairs, only ‘a few stools and a creepie or two’, and Alexander never slept in a bed until he was 14.

Instead, he lay on the floor of the loft, with his clothes as a pillow - and sometimes his rags were almost ‘too scanty to dust a violin’.

If there were no potatoes in the pot, he drew sustenance from the adoration of his mother, his ‘lady of the Chimney Corner’. And thankfully for him love was enough.

It is certainly a very different take on what life was like for impoverished local folk at the tail end of the 19th century.

But that’s the trouble with perspective. The view changes dramatically depending on where you are standing.

Perhaps Shakespeare summed it up best:

“The eye sees all, but the mind shows us what we want to see.”