'Hiring Fairs and Market Places' by May Blair, published by Appletree Press

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extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair.

COUNTY LONDONDERRY

Maghera came into its own as a Post and Market town. Around 1800 coaches travelling between Dungannon and Coleraine met regularly at Falls’ Hotel at twelve noon. The Londonderry–Belfast coach also arrived at noon. Market Day was Tuesday; the last Tuesday in the month was Fair Day, and the day for selling corn was Friday. There were no tolls collected after 1832, when the townspeople purchased that right from Alexander Clark, then-proprietor of the town. Mr Clark remained, however, their main benefactor. He built the two market houses, established the butter market, provided the poor with turf, and set up a spinning fund for twelve poor housekeepers. He also encouraged the building of a Presbyterian meeting house and the making of new roads with the active support of the Drapers’ and Mercers’ Companies under the guidance of the Irish Society.
Maghera’s fairs and markets were extensive, encompassing hiring and the sale of potatoes, sheep, pigs, horses and cattle of every description; also wearing apparel, hardware, tinware, delph, riddles, tubs, chairs and the hundred and one miscellaneous items needed in every home in the countryside. Its linen market ceased even before the slump in the linen trade because of a row which broke out between the weavers and merchants over the quality of a web of cloth. Vitriol was thrown over the merchants who thereafter took their custom to Magherafelt.
Two fairs were held each year a few miles away in the village of Curran – one in June and the other in November. Sometimes they were of so little consequence that hardly anyone turned up. On 23 November 1836 only twenty cows and one pig were exhibited for sale.
The nearby village of Castledawson supported markets and fairs until the 1800s but after that they declined there but began to flourish in Bellaghy. Castledawson, once called Dawson’s Bridge, was a former linen village founded by the Dawson family from Westmorland. Its four fairs died out altogether in the 1830s due mainly to the nearness of the excellent fairs in Magherafelt. However the village was well supplied with meat, dairy products, poultry and eggs; also Bann eels from Toome, and Lough Neagh trout and pollan – all abundant and cheap in their season.
Bellaghy started off with two fairs which increased to twelve in 1805. Thereafter they were held regularly on the first Monday of every month until fairs ceased in the middle of the twentieth century. The usual farm animals were bought and sold (but no horses), also pedlars’ goods and earthenware. There was a weekly market for flax and yarn. There were in addition two registered fairs on 12 May and 12 November which in all probability were hiring fairs. Bellaghy has a fine example of a Plantation bawn which was built in 1622 for the Vintners’ Company, though the Vintners were seldom there. At the same time a church was built; also a corn mill and twelve wooden houses, all of which were either slated or tiled. Bellaghy Church was yet another destroyed by rebels in 1641. The Vintners’ and Salters’ Companies (who undertook to ‘improve and plant’ lands north and south of the Moyola River) did not make the progress on their estates they might have done, due to the fact that they let their land out to agents or middlemen whose aim was to make as much money out of it as possible. These agents could (and did) put rents up at will, whether the tenants could afford it or not. Tenants were known to sell every last item of food produced on their land and do without food themselves in order to meet the agents’ demands. Magherafelt was in the Salters’ estate for which a grant was obtained in 1631. In that year a licence was granted to Ralph Whistler, agent of the company, to hold a market every Thursday and two annual fairs each lasting two days. The fairs were so successful that they increased to four sometime in the eighteenth century, twelve by the nineteenth and were actually being held twice monthly at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. They were held on the streets until 1840 when the lessees (the Bateson family) provided a Fair Hill for the purpose. They also built a market in Charity Street. At the time (1836) it was considered a great asset to the town, but within a short space of time the markets for grass seed, hay, straw, pork, young pigs, flax, etc. were back on the streets. The town had a market house, market yard, courthouse, grain market and corn store; also a linen hall situated beside the courthouse at the north end of Broad Street. The linen hall had wooden stands on which the merchants stood when the market was in progress. Linen was sold twice monthly. Large quantities of grain and pork were at one time exported from the Magherafelt area to Belfast and Newry, both by road in carts and by lighter from Ballyronan.

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