Eleanor Campbell kept a public house in Maghery, near the Blackwater quay. On the morning of 22 November 1830, between eleven and twelve o'clock, she was standing in her doorway when a great number of men came down across the fields. They smashed her windows, fired a gun at her son on the loft, stabbed her with a bayonet, took her gun, broke her clock, spilled five or six gallons of spirits and beer, robbed her of her money. They called out, "We are Killyman boys." Her deposition, sworn before a Parliamentary Select Committee five years later, is part of the printed record. Twenty-six houses in Maghery were wrecked that day. Seven Orangemen were charged with the attack. All were acquitted. This is what a small village on Lough Neagh sometimes carries in its memory.
Maghery sits in the northwest corner of County Armagh, on the southwest shore of Lough Neagh, near Derrywarragh Island. Its strategic significance, in centuries when armies and traders moved by water, came from its position between the estuaries of the rivers Blackwater and Bann - the two mouths only two miles apart. The name Maghery is a shortening of the older Magherygreenan, anglicised from Irish. Coney Island, with its early Christian monastic associations, lies about a kilometre off shore. The Blackwater is navigable from Maghery upstream to Blackwatertown; the small Maghery Canal joins it south of Derrywarragh Island. The village is the kind of place that exists because of where rivers go, not because anyone in particular planted it there.
The 1830 attack was not isolated. In May 1894, the funeral procession of Thomas Irwin - an elderly Orangeman from the townland of Cranfield, being carried from his home to burial in Milltown graveyard - passed through Maghery. According to the Belfast Newsletter's report, a Nationalist crowd attacked the procession with sticks and stones. Members of the Orange party allegedly fired revolver shots in return; two of the assailants were wounded. The police arrested two Orangemen and were then themselves fired upon by Nationalists trying to free them. Twelve men were arrested on the lough shore. Captain Slacke, Divisional Commissioner, came out from Armagh the next day. Both sides were charged - the Orangemen with shooting and wounding, the Nationalists with unlawful assembly and firing shots. On 23 May 1936, rioting broke out again between locals and a visiting party at the Maghery hotel, after rumours that the visitors had attacked the chapel. It is the kind of small-place violence that simply doesn't get written into national histories, but it leaves a long shadow.
For most of its history Maghery was connected to the wider lough by water, not road. A car ferry crossed the mouth of the River Blackwater until the 1970s, when it was withdrawn and the village lost its direct link to the eastern shore. Decades later, the Maghery Bridge was built specifically to restore that connection, but only for walkers and cyclists - it is a key link on the Loughshore Trail cycle route that circles Lough Neagh. The slipway at the east end of the village marks where the old ferry used to dock. Boat trips out to Coney Island still run at weekends, from Maghery Country Park or from Kinnego Marina on the opposite shore.
Maghery Country Park covers 30 acres of woodland walks and picnic areas on the lough shore - a green wedge between village and water that draws birdwatchers and walkers throughout the year. Five kilometres of trails wind through ancient woodland and reedbed habitat. Fishermen come for the Blackwater, which is famed throughout Ireland for its catches: salmon, brown trout, pike, perch, roach, bream and the eels for which the lough as a whole is legendary. Gaelic games are the dominant sport. Maghery Sean MacDermott's GAC, the local club, takes its name from the Roscommon-born republican executed in 1916 after the Easter Rising - a reminder of how political memory in Ulster villages threads through the names of even the football clubs.
Maghery had a population of just over two thousand at the 2001 census. It sits within the Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council area, two miles from the M1 motorway, with Translink bus service 75 running daily to both Portadown and Dungannon (about 35 minutes either way). St Mary's Primary School educates the village's children. The Loughshore Trail brings cyclists through. Most days, Maghery is exactly what it appears to be: an ordinary Lough Neagh village where people fish in the morning and watch the sun set over Derrywarragh Island in the evening. The depositions in the parliamentary record, and the Belfast Newsletter clippings from 1894, are part of what the place quietly carries - one set of memories among many, in a small village at the meeting of two rivers.
Stand at the slipway in Maghery and look northeast across Lough Neagh; on a clear day you can pick out the Sperrins receding into haze over County Tyrone. Look northwest and the Blackwater opens its estuary toward Coalisland and Dungannon. Look southeast and the Bann winds back toward Portadown. This is one of the geographical hinges of Ulster - a place where the catchments of half the province come together and pour into the largest lake in the British Isles. The water that comes out the far side, via the Lower Bann, becomes the drinking water of Belfast. The Maghery Bridge that walkers cross on summer evenings is, in its quiet way, a thread between everything that flows into Lough Neagh and everything that flows out.
Located at 54.51°N, 6.57°W on the southwest shore of Lough Neagh, in the northwest corner of County Armagh. Recommended viewing altitude 1,000-2,000 ft AGL to take in the meeting of the Rivers Blackwater and Bann, Derrywarragh Island, Coney Island, and Maghery Country Park. Belfast International (EGAA) sits 12 nm east-northeast across the lough. The M1 motorway runs just south of the village. Best viewed from the south or southwest in late afternoon, when the low sun catches the lake and silhouettes the wooded shoreline.