Ballymoney

A north Antrim market town planted by lowland Scots in the early 1600s, whose people went on to back the Volunteers, the United Irishmen and the tenant-right cause. In 1718 five ships left with Presbyterian ministers and their congregations for New England. It hosts the oldest drama festival in Ireland, founded in 1933, and in 1913 its town hall held a meeting with Roger Casement on the platform against Carson's unionists.

An English account of 1556 records a bishop's house joined with a castle and church 'called Ballymonyn'; it was destroyed in 1641, but the tower of a church built in 1637 by Sir Randal MacDonnell survives as the oldest structure in town. Sir Randal brought in settlers from lowland Scotland, mostly Presbyterians, and in 1718 five ships carried ministers and their flocks to New England. From 1778 the district drilled with the Volunteers and from 1795 swore the United Irish test. In June 1798 men gathered on Dungobery Hill but dispersed after the defeat at Antrim; troops burned the town and many rebels were hanged or transported.

Lewis in 1837 found a market town of 2,222 people with a long-established linen market, and rail links to Belfast and Derry by 1860. In 1847 the workhouse held 870 inmates at one point. In 1869 the Rev. James Armour helped form the Route Tenants Defence Association, and in October 1913 a meeting in the town hall with Casement and Alice Stopford Green drew the London papers. The town stayed unionist. Fourteen people died in the area during the Troubles, among them the three Quinn brothers, killed in a UVF petrol bomb attack in 1998. The Balnamore linen mill closed in 1959.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Ballymoney ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Craigs Dolmen · tomb · 9 km
• Dooey's Cairn · tomb · 10 km
• Armoy · round tower · 14 km
• Killowen Castle · castle · 13 km
• Coleraine Castle · castle · 13 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Mount Sandel · Ireland's oldest known settlement — where hunter-gatherers built huts above the Bann around 7000 BC. There is nothing to see but the view; that is the point.
• Dunluce Castle · MacDonnell stronghold on a sea-stack; in 1639 the kitchen fell into the sea, cooks and all. The lost town beside it was only found in 2011.
• The Giant's Causeway · Built by Fionn to cross to Scotland and fight the giant Benandonner — who fled back and tore up the road when Fionn's wife showed him 'the baby' (Fionn in a bonnet).

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.