extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair. COUNTY DOWN Loughbrickland, Scarva, Gilford and Moira can all lay claim to having been market towns and had fairs at some stage in their history. Those at Loughbrickland did not survive the eighteenth century. Scarva held fairs (but never more than four) which prospered from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Moira also had four and a good market which died out around 1880. Although the markets ceased, fairs continued in both places until the twentieth century. Both benefited throughout the years from nearby canal and rail transport. The main cargoes were farm produce and fuel (generally peat in one direction, coal in the other); also lime in the case of Moira.       Although Gilford had a weekly market and twelve fairs in the second half of the nineteenth century they died out when farmers began to take their produce to the more prosperous markets in Portadown and Banbridge. Large numbers of cattle were sold in Dromara while cattle, pigs, sheep and a few horses were at one time sold in Hillsborough. Fairs continued in both places until well into the twentieth century. Local farmer Morgan Greer reminisces:       In Hillsborough the fair was held at the top of the main street and round the corner as far as Park Street. You brought maybe five or six cattle and turned them to face the wall opposite the Shambles, mostly stores around a year old. Dealers – they would have helped each other. One fellow would have bid you so much. Then another would have bid you so much less and tried to convince you that you were asking too much to make you bring the price down.       Cattle made an awful mess on the street especially at the time of year when they were coming off the grass. It would have been up the walls and everywhere! There was a surveyor lived at the top of the street – Sam Stewart I think he was called. He used to keep his place very tidy. He used to put out barrels with planks across to keep beasts away from his door. But once Allam’s got going in Belfast that was the beginning of the end for country fairs. That was about the 1920s. Allams would have been selling cattle ’til nine and ten at night. People were a long time ’til they accepted the change but it came eventually.       Dromara had a market for linen yarn and Hillsborough a small linen market at the turn of the nineteenth century. Dromara’s market was celebrated for its butter which was bought by dealers, taken to Belfast and exported to Liverpool. Hillsborough market was never really successful owing to the nearness of Lisburn and ceased altogether sometime before 1880. Fairs were held in both towns until the outbreak of the 1939-45 war. It had a good potato market for a number of years but eventually that too ceased. The Hill family had a reputation for generosity. They never collected tolls in any of their villages. At one time Hillsborough had an estate office where eighty thousand pounds in rents crossed the counter every year. Much of this was passed back to the tenants in wages and charity.       Dromara did not have the luxury of a hotel but Hillsborough was on the coach route to Dublin and post horses, chaises and cars could be obtained at the Corporation Arms (later called the Royal Corporation) at the top of the Main Street. The market house was close by in the Square and the Shambles was only a matter of yards away on the Dromore side of the village. The countryside round about was good farming land and most farmers kept hired help.       Matt Kelly was destined to settle in the Hillsborough area though he had never ever intended working on a farm and he was to work at a number of other jobs first. His first job on leaving school was feeding flax into the crimpers in a flax mill but that ended when the mill closed down. Work was hard to find in the 1920s and he was lucky to be offered a job in a corn mill, even if it was only shovelling the hulls into the furnace that dried the corn. That ended when he decided to go to a football match one Saturday afternoon instead of turning up for work. After that there was nothing for it but to try his luck in a hiring fair. Matt takes up the story: I was just sixteen at the time. The quarterly fair was coming up in February. I got my bundle under my arm and walked it to Newry. It was a big come-down. It meant sleeping away from home for the first time and I didn’t fancy it. I hired that day with a man called Joe Dodds at three poun’ for three months and went home with him that day in the cart.       He was a Protestant and I was a Catholic. I asked him, ‘Will I get to Mass of a Sunday?’       ‘That’s all right,’ he said. He lived at a place called Desert about five mile out of Newry. He had about twenty or thirty acres af land and kep’ two horses. At that time he was considered a big farmer. He was a very decent man and a sergeant in the B Specials. I had my own room in the house with an iron bed-stead and a feather mattress and a good bolster to put my head on. On the first morning I tidied myself to go to Sheeptown Chapel. I was just going out the door when Joe called out in a sharp voice, ‘Where are you going, boy?’       ‘I’m going to Mass, Joe.’       ‘Come back here. You’re not going out of Joe Dodds’s house that way. You know where the polish is. Get them boots cleaned.’ That was the sort of Joe Dodds. He didn’t want anybody going from his house that didn’t look respectable. Anyway I stayed there just three months. I wasn’t getting enough money so back I went to the May hiring. Matt was typical of most hired workers in that he made the most of whatever situation he found himself in, realising that it would be foolish to bite the hand that fed him. He hired at several places after that, some good and some bad. At one place he had the temerity to mention that the porridge was too thin for him to sup. The next morning he could stand his spoon up in it. At another the bedclothes weren’t changed during the six months he was there. At yet another he could see the stars through the roof of the barn as he lay in bed. However, he was usually so tired that he slept soundly even when the rain poured in.       Extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair. Previous extracts regarding County Armagh: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Forthcoming extracts regarding County Down: Part 11 | Part 12 |

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