Qualla: Crumlin, County Antrim

Crumlin, County Antrim: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erl Johnston, CC BY-SA 4.0. At about ten o'clock on the morning of 13 September 1902, the air above County Antrim made a noise people would still be describing decades later. Some thought it was a train running off the rails. Others guessed a boiler had exploded in the linen mill. A few said it sounded like a swarm of bees pressed up against the windows. None of them were right. A meteorite was tearing through the atmosphere at thirty thousand miles an hour, slowing as it burned, until the rock that survived the descent hit Andrew Walker's farmland near Crumlin. The Natural History Museum in London paid for it. It stayed in England for 121 years. In February 2023 it came home, on loan to the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

Read more: Crumlin, County Antrim on Qualla

Image: Erl Johnston | CC BY-SA 4.0

Crumlin, County Antrim: A Linen Town Beside the Lough

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Giorgio Galeotti, CC BY 4.0. Crumlin sits twenty miles west of Belfast city centre and three miles from Belfast International Airport at Aldergrove, the international gateway to Northern Ireland. The town's old linen mill was built in 1809. According to a survey in 1808, the village then had 430 people, one ...

Read more: Crumlin, County Antrim on Qualla

Image: Giorgio Galeotti | CC BY 4.0

Crumlin, County Antrim: Naíscoil Ghleann Darach

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Crumlin is one of the places where the Irish language is quietly being rebuilt. Naíscoil and Gaelscoil Ghleann Darach - the nursery and primary school operating through the medium of Irish - now educate about a hundred children with fifteen staff. The Gaelscoil is recognised by t...

Read more: Crumlin, County Antrim on Qualla

Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Crumlin, County Antrim: The Twelfth in 2012

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NorthernCounties (talk), Public domain. In July 2012, the Orange Order's Twelfth celebration was hosted in Crumlin for the first time in twelve years. The march had grown in scale - more bands, more participants, more flags than the village had seen since the previous hosting. Tension built in advance. The Parades Comm...

Read more: Crumlin, County Antrim on Qualla

Image: NorthernCounties (talk) | Public domain

Crumlin, County Antrim: The Meteorite, Returned

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Crumlin meteorite is a chondrite - a stony meteorite preserving material from the early solar system, more than four and a half billion years old. When it hit Andrew Walker's farm in 1902, the sonic boom was heard up to ten miles away. Two pieces were recovered, totalling abo...

Read more: Crumlin, County Antrim on Qualla

Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0