Ballymoney Conflict and War

Ballymoney’s Old Church Tower, completed in 1637, was burnt down just four years later — the opening event in a long history of the town being caught up in wider Irish conflicts.

The 1641 Rebellion

Newly arrived Scottish Presbyterian settlers and the native Irish population were already in tension when rebellion broke out in 1641 against King Charles I’s rule. Irish forces seized the settlement at Agivey on the River Bann and defeated Royalist forces near Ballymoney at Leaney and Portna, before the rebellion was crushed the following year.

The Ballymoney Volunteers and the 1798 Rebellion

In 1778, with Ireland exposed by troops sent to fight abroad, local men formed the self-financed Ballymoney Volunteer Company — around 70–100 recruits, commanded by local landowner James Leslie of Leslie Hill. The Volunteers were disbanded in 1793 after becoming politically active enough to worry the government.

The Society of United Irishmen, formed in Belfast in 1791, drew on similar Presbyterian reform sentiment, and its rebellion broke out in June 1798. When it reached North Antrim, five thousand rebels gathered at Kilraughts; government forces found Ballymoney itself largely deserted, its people having fled to Kilraughts or Coleraine. Colonel Lord Henry Murray ordered the town burned as punishment. In the aftermath, Ballymoney magistrate George “Bloody” Hutchinson became notorious for ruthlessly sentencing captured rebels to hanging or transportation — his former home is marked on the town’s heritage trail.

The World Wars

Ballymoney lost over 300 men in the First World War, documented in local historian Robert Thompson’s book Ballymoney Heroes. Names from both World Wars and the Korean conflict are recorded on the town’s war memorial, unveiled in November 2000 — see Historic Sites Around Ballymoney for the memorial itself.