From its beginnings the parish church was set in about two acres of the gentle hillside surrounding it. If any gravestones or other memorials were erected in the early days of the church, any of these from before 1660 have not survived. Indeed even the few known seventeenth-century stones which still decorate the churchyard only exist today because their original inscriptions spent much of their time hiding their words from the weather, and from public view.

It would appear that at some period in the early nineteenth century a few large stones were recycled by being laid face down on the earth, possibly to foil grave robbers and certainly to present a clean surface for a later stone mason to carve a totally new inscription on the reverse. At some more recent time these headstones were re-erected in a vertical position to disclose their more ancient inscriptions.

Almost all of the stones in Donaghadee’s churchyard are simple tablets, the earliest being of local Scrabo sandstone or Castle Espie limestone, the later of slate and eventually of harder imported stones like granite or marble. A large proportion of them have unpretentious pictorial decorations, usually at the top. Many have doves of peace, laurel wreaths, olive branches or ivy leaves. There are representations, not too botanically correct, of a variety of flowers. Many have geometrical designs, usually inscribed with engraving compasses. Eighteen have anchors, ten have Masonic set squares and dividers, three have coats of arms, two have trumpeting angels and two have a skull and crossbones motif on their faces.

Although it is the Church of Ireland which dominates the churchyard, the burial ground itself seems always to have been recognized as the last resting place for any citizens of the civil parish of Donaghadee, an area encompassing about twenty square miles, mostly to the south and west of the town itself.

In a town and hinterland so predominantly Presbyterian, such a system would almost have been inevitable. From the inscriptions on the stones it is an impossible job to determine what the religions of those commemorated really were. The mathematics of the different church registers of members makes it nearly certain that the great majority would have been Presbyterians from the earliest days of the churchyard. The evidence from the stones themselves tells us that in the churchyard are ten recorded burials of clergymen, from at least three local churches, so we have some indication of the community nature of the churchyard.

If some Presbyterians, Methodists or Roman Catholics chose to be buried elsewhere, or whose markers have disappeared, this is also the case with the Anglicans. A random sample of names taken from a surviving list from the Donaghadee parish register of those buried between 1771 and 1841 produces very few whose inscriptions can be found today.

Like many settlements of both the living and the dead which have evolved over centuries, Donaghadee Churchyard displays very little evidence today of planning or organization, except that the older stones tend to be close to the church building and the newer stones towards the periphery. Local evidence suggests that a number of the earliest burials were so close to the Seventeenth century church that later developments discovered unknown and unmarked remains during building and repair work.

All through the twentieth century the care and order of the densely-packed churchyard was the responsibility of a series of sextons from the Harpur family. These men performed excellent work, but their records, like those of their predecessors, were kept mainly in their heads. At the end of the century an attempt was made to draw accurate plans of the churchyard and record all the known graves on these, but this work was never published.

In 1976 the Ulster Historical Foundation, largely through the efforts of Professor Richard Clarke, recorded all the stones previously published in the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead volumes and all those stones, still visible, which show burials dated up to 1920.

In this publication there are records of 627 headstones. Ten of these have no known burials, only the names of the original purchasers. It is not known if anyone is actually buried there. Memorials have been inscribed to 2,389 men, women and children on the remainder of the stones. Not all of these are named. A few children never did have their names recorded, possibly because of very early deaths, and many names originally inscribed have been erased by the ravages of time.

When one sees the large number of stones and tablets dedicated for whatever reason to the memory of only one person it is a little surprising to discover that the average number of recordings on each stone is four names. Twenty-three stones with commendable economy have over ten names inscribed, with two having as many as twenty.

In most cases we may assume that the first inscription on the stone is the earliest, although this is certainly not always the case. Allowance must be made both for severe weathering causing such depredation to stones that they have been removed, and also for some veneration for things extremely old causing careful conservation of the very oldest headstones, but there does seem to be a very clear pattern of growth in the erection of gravestones. The numbers stay quite small from 1660 for about a century; then there is a sharp rise to a peak in the 1830s with almost a hundred new headstones in that decade. From this point there is a slow decline until about 1870 when there occurs only an occasional erection of a memorial for the remainder of the century and a flurry of new stones in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly near the north gate. This is somewhat surprising since the Donaghadee churchyard was only superseded by the town’s municipal cemetery at Ballyvester in January, 1948, and indeed as recently as November 2002 there was a burial in the churchyard.

For any visitor to an ancient churchyard the most obvious type of entry which forces its way into the observer’s consciousness is the number of recordings of the deaths of children. Donaghadee’s churchyard is no exception. An amazing 581 of the people recorded on the headstones were under 21 years of age at the time of their deaths. A few were well-grown youths, but the vast majority were young children. We know something of the circumstances, e.g. dates of death and ages, of almost 400 of these young people, but as many as 201 children had their deaths marked without indication about what their names were nor an exact date when they died. It seems likely that a few were infants, but that most were still-born or only survived for a brief time.

Over half of these children (301), both named and anonymous, died in the first half of the nineteenth century. Care must be taken before making any conclusions, because we already know that the peak decades for all recorded deaths were at that time. When the number of deaths of children for this half-century are compared with the number of deaths in other half-centuries we discover that in the two halves of the eighteenth century, child mortality, at least as far as the inscriptions tell us, was 28% and 29% respectively. The rate for the first half of the nineteenth as recorded on the Donaghadee headstones was 22.5%, and for the latter half of that century 22% of the total population. The global figures are too small, and the surviving record of deaths too haphazard for any definitive conclusions to be drawn, but any statistician would agree that these are certainly interesting figures. They do seem to indicate that although heartrending by twenty-first century standards this death-toll did reduce a little from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century – perhaps especially surprising when one considers the Great Famine and the fevers which accompanied it.

When people view the past they often imagine that for everyone life was “nasty, brutish and short.” What must be contrasted with the depressing child mortality noted above is the incidence of long life for many indicated on the Donaghadee gravestones. A large number of those named were recorded as being in their seventies and eighties; as many as 47 were in their nineties and three were shown as centenarians. Mary Young died at the age of 100 in 1804, Mary Mountgomery was 104 when she died in 1794 and John Taylor was a staggering 121 when he died in 1775.

Occupations were rarely inscribed on the stones of those memorialised. Exceptions were members of the clergy, soldiers and medical men. From the Rev. Andrew Stewart (mentioned above) who died in 1671, until the Rev. Henry Coote who died in 1913 there were buried seven Church of Ireland vicars and/or rectors, including John Coningham, James Arbuckle, John Arnold, John Adams and John Hill. Two other vicars are mentioned, John Bowglass burying his wife and Nicholas Hamilton burying his son.

Five Wesleyan, or Methodist, ministers are named. These are Samuel Harpur, Thomas McIntyre and Samuel Wood buried in the churchyard, and William Foote and John Hill, each burying his wife. At least three Presbyterian ministers are recorded – John McAuley of Millisle, William Skelly of Donaghadee and Hans Douglas, recorded as burying his father.

Men of medicine were held in a similar regard in their communities. In Donaghadee churchyard we find nine doctors named and their profession inscribed. Two men, Bourjonval de Lacherois and Charles Hurst, are shown as MDs. and William Allister Catherwood is described as Surgeon-General. The others are Surgeons Cunningham, Blakeney and Walker, Dr. John Connelly and two Doctors called William McCance.

Nine soldiers and five sailors are named on the headstones. Of the soldiers two were sergeants – Anthony Gourley of the 8th Regiment of Dragoons and a Sgt. Hicks who was burying his daughter, Mary. Ensign Nicholas Delacherois of the 47th Regiment of the line was killed in the Peninsular War at Barrosa, another Nicholas Delacherois, a Lieutenant of the 7th Dragoon Guards, died in 1874 and Lieutenants William McMinn and James Power of His Majesty’s 15th and 32nd Regiments of Foot respectively died in 1829 and 1831.

Samuel Louis Delacherois, who died in 1836, was a Captain in the Antrim Militia, Major William Hull of His Majesty’s 62nd Regiment died in 1831 and Major Sir Thomas Lowry C.B. of the 7th Native Infantry of the East India Company died in 1819. Another member of the Delacherois family, Colonel Daniel Louis, of the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles and the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, died in 1909. Two Generals are shown burying members of their family, but not themselves. George Leslie of the Royal Artillery (whose local connection is remembered by The General’s Walk, a short street of houses off the Millisle Road) buried his wife in 1893 and in 1924 Major-General McPherson buried his daughter.

It is somewhat surprising, given its maritime location and traditions, to discover so few naval officers and men among the names recorded in Donaghadee churchyard. The inscriptions for Boatswain William Wilson who died in 1833, “a young naval officer” called Peter Murray who drowned in Belfast Lough in an accident in 1850 and the grave of Commander John Land Wynn who died in 1844 are readily found. The last mentioned was a retired naval officer who became the Superintendent of the Donaghadee-Portpatrick Packet Company just a few years before this paddle-steamer service was discontinued in favour of the new Larne-Stranraer Ferry.

Another Delacherois family member, Lieutenant Louis, died in 1859 from injuries suffered during the Crimean War, reminding us that this war was not just magnificent cavalry charges. The best-known naval officer from the town is undoubtedly Rear-Admiral Samuel Leslie. His naval history may not be too familiar, but like the general and his walk, he is commemorated in Donaghadee by the Admiral Leslie Hall, now a Baptist church and formerly a “Free” School. This was founded in 1872 by the legacy of his widow, Martha, and dedicated to the memory of the Rear-Admiral.

Of much more immediate maritime interest to the people of Donaghadee was the Revenue Service. All through the nineteenth century customs-men, coastguards and water-guards kept a close eye on all legal and not-so-legal activities on the sea between Donaghadee and Portpatrick. Seven men who served in some of these capacities have their gravestones in the churchyard and Coastguard James Skinner buried two of his children there. John Bennett of Donaghadee rose in the Customs Service to be Superintendent in the station in Jersey in the Channel Islands and is commemorated in his home town. Possibly the most interesting inscription in the churchyard for a coastguard, and certainly the most sensational, must be that for Lieutenant Wintringham Seacole. According to a long account on the rather imposing stone, he was foully murdered by a colleague on his return from a journey on foot to Millisle on New Year’s Eve, 1839.

Another New Year’s Eve is commemorated on a 1905 epitaph. This one was erected by the citizens of Donaghadee to remember Samuel Edwards, Christopher Williams and A J Robin who drowned at Coalpit Bay just to the south of the town when a cargo ship called the Catherine Rennie foundered there. There is a popular local story that the quality of the ship’s cargo of heatherbrown quarry tiles was so good that there was hardly a back-yard in the town that was not enhanced by the laying of any which could be salvaged.

Donaghadee’s coastal setting is well represented on the Donaghadee gravestones by men of the merchant service and fishermen. Eight of the men interred in the churchyard are given the title of “Captain”, usually recognized as meaning the owner of one or more sailing vessels. Four others are described as Master Mariners, and thirty are given the epithet of “mariner”. The importance of the sea, the ferry route and fishing is certainly evoked by the anchors inscribed on another eighteen of the churchyard’s headstones.

The realities of a life so influenced by the sea has its dark side too. Many of Donaghadee’s gravestones show the names of people marked as having “drowned”. Twenty-six of these were men, many in the course of their work, but two of them were women, Mary Anne McPeake in 1876 and Mary Heron Campbell. The latter was drowned with her husband, Captain William Campbell and her three children on board the Lord Raglan which went down in 1890.

One of the anchor-marked stones tells posterity of the tragic loss of a father and son, both called Matthew Gibson, who were drowned when the Bottley Wood foundered between Westport and Philadelphia in 1847. The father was 36 and the son, 16. Their bodies, like those of the great majority of such victims, were never found.

Occasionally the victims of drownings who were buried in Donaghadee were lost on ships which were wrecked on one of the Copeland Islands. These three islands of Mew, Lighthouse and Copeland Island were always a hazard to shipping and there are records of braziers and early lighthouses from the seventeenth century erected to reduce the incidence of such disasters.

Only one of the Copeland Islands was ever occupied by anything more than a lighthouse crew. Copeland Island itself, or the “Big Isle” as it was usually called locally, had as many as one hundred people, usually named Clegg or Emerson, living and farming on it. The island has its own churchyard in an ancient quarry, but curiously a number of those interred there are mainlanders with some romantic attachment to the islands, whilst many of the headstones in Donaghadee churchyard are dedicated to islanders who preferred to be buried in that town. No one can be certain of the correct location of the dwellings of the Cleggs and Emersons who are buried in Donaghadee, but at least six of the Emersons, or Embersons, as their tombstones have it, are definitely islanders.

Others were not able to find a resting place in their native town. Many of the headstones bear witness to the loss of a loved one, made no easier to bear by the distance they were from home when their time came. These people are remembered on gravestones and church tablets in Donaghadee, even though their actual place of burial was far away.

We may read of some who died in other parts of Ireland, some in Scotland and England and many who met their end in far-distant lands. There are inscriptions stating that some beloved family member died in Denmark, Sweden, Toronto, St John, Chicago, New York, Lake Erie, Mobile, Savannah, Burhampoor, Bengal, Sydney, Auckland and Johannesburg, a testament to the diaspora as common to Donaghadee as to any other Irish community.

The thousands of names which we can see inscribed today, or which were still extant when the Memorials of the Dead were compiled, are only a fraction, perhaps an acceptably large one, of all the memorials which were placed at Donaghadee Churchyard. But it must be remembered that even if all these names had survived they would only represent those men, women and children whose loved ones chose to place their names there, and who could afford to pay for the stones and the carving of their inscriptions.

There is a clear implication that most of the names found will have been in families with a degree of comfort in their lives. The poorest squatters and cottiers would mostly have been buried in unmarked graves, soon to be forgotten by all but a few close relatives. In the lowest-lying part of the churchyard, on the west side, beside the town’s seventeenth-century animal pound, are a number of unmarked graves.

Not everyone who is recorded on the stones was wealthy or important in the community, but many were. The trappings of money so conspicuously displayed in life are echoed in death. The largest tombs and the longest inscriptions are those of the family which became the lords of the soil after Thomas Montgomery died. Montgomery’s widow, Marie Angelique Delacherois, died in 1771 and bequeathed her properties in the parish to her heirs and descendants.

Their family vault under the west aisle of the church has eighteen names inscribed as being interred there. There is also a large vault-tomb nearby in the churchyard with thirteen other Delacherois family members interred in it. Other influential and landowning families made certain to record the passing of a number of their members too. The best known are the Vaughans and Leslies of Donaghadee, the Catherwoods of Ballyvester, the Nevins of Craigboy and the McMinns of Herdstown.

For anyone with a knowledge of the local history of Donaghadee and Ulster there are names which stand out on this roll of death. The Andrew Stewart who in 1687 wrote the unflattering descriptions of the people who made Donaghadee, was buried there. Grace Neill, the owner of the public house which still bears her name, was born Grace Kelly in 1818 and was buried in Donaghadee churchyard in 1916.

James Craig, or Lord Craigavon, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, had Donaghadee origins. Near the eastern gate of the churchyard is the grave of his grandfather, also James Craig, who died at Ballyvester in 1868.

War heroes rather incongruously have their place in Donaghadee too. There are two headstones too recent to be mentioned in the Gravestone Inscriptions book. Ten feet from Jean Mackgwear’s gravestone near the east wall of the church there stands a solitary War Commission grave, dedicated to the memory of Gunner J. C. B. Harris, a soldier in the Royal Artillery who fell in 1940 aged 27 years. Around the corner, on the south side of the churchyard is the grave of 21-year-old Lt. William Kenny V.C. of the Garhwal Rifles. Inside the church is a memorial to the fallen in the Great War which is perhaps unique. In order to accommodate Lt. Kenny’s glorious death at Kot Kai in Afghanistan in a known war, it uniquely dates the First World War as lasting from 1914 until 1920.

Anyone entering Belfast from County Down across the Queen’s Bridge can still see the sky-blue gable of the premises of James Tedford, Ship Chandler on Donegall Quay. But the business itself has moved recently and the original building is now a restaurant. Tedford was a Sea Captain who began his business in New Street in Donaghadee4 and only moved to the burgeoning city of Belfast in 1851. He is buried in Donaghadee churchyard. His move to Belfast was clearly to follow his mentor, James Lemon, who had successfully moved a similar business to Donegall Quay a few years earlier. Lemon was also a ship-owner and chandler. In 1798 he had been possibly the only member of Donaghadee’s wealthy establishment to sympathise with the ideals of the United Irishmen, and must have spent up to forty years facing down his old Loyalist and Anglican friends who would never have ceased regarding him as a one-time rebel.

For fairly obvious reasons there is no overt memorial to the men, and possibly women, who were actually “up” as rebels in that difficult time, but many from both sides in the conflict are buried in the same churchyard. Depositions were recorded at courts held in Newtownards during the days after the crushing of the rebels in the northern theatre of the conflict in 1798.5 The names of as many as seven men, cited in these depositions are buried in Donaghadee. David Campbell, reported as being the baker at the Donaghadee rebel camp, lived for over a quarter of a century after 1798. William Carson died in 1805, William Brown in 1832 and James Fullerton in 1847.

Two years before the break-out of the Rebellion, the Donaghadee Customs Collector made a list of likely Yeomen who would help protect the town and its Packet Boats. Those named included Samuel Smyth, James Shaw, Nevin Taylor and Alexander McMinn, all of whom may have taken the field against the rebels two years later. Arbuckle’s list, however, was flawed. It also contained the name of John Nevin of Cannyreagh, who did take the field – but as a rebel.6

The published volume of inscriptions mentions a stone which it states is “no longer visible.” It recorded the burial of a Donaghadee insurgent who, if not quite anonymous, has certainly rested in a degree of obscurity. William Morison (or Morrison) was executed on 11 July 1798 for his senior role in the capture of the town and harbour of Donaghadee at the outbreak of the rebellion,7 and buried in this churchyard. The man who was probably the leader of the rebels who occupied Donaghadee was a man called Bernard Crosby, but there is no sign that he was ever buried locally.

As one might expect in an area so predominantly of Anglo-Scots origin, virtually every word inscribed in its churchyard is in English, although a very few men of learning have displayed their knowledge by causing a Latin inscription to be used on their headstones. What is conspicuous by its total absence is any sign of the Ulster-Scots tongue. Perhaps this is because it was just that – a spoken tongue, rather than a written language, and considered inappropriate to the serious commemoration of loved ones. There is some misspelling of names and other words, but these can be excused in the absence of universal literacy. The only cases of what appears to be a deliberate use of vernacular vocabulary are Andrew McGaw’s stone, the only one which claims, “3 fut south”, and Andrew Cristy’s, uniquely inscribed for two of his “childer”, and of course both fut and childer are examples of extended use of Elizabethan English rather than Scots.

Almost sixty of the stones recorded carry a few lines in rhyme displaying a simple unquestioning faith and telling the world that the deceased has gone to Glory. Many are fairly obviously taken from some publication of suitable laudatory verses. A good example would be the tribute to his wife left by John Johnson. Unfortunately he neglected to give any other information about her. We may assume that her passing was shortly before her husband’s, which the stone says was in 1827:

Within her bed of rest Eliza lies
Who left terrene and earthly things
And chose a mansion in the skies
The palace of the King of Kings.

The Memorials of the Dead 8 tells us about a stone that is now lost. It had an anchor and a heart inscribed on it, and a message telling us that when James Davison died in Donaghadee in 1707 at the age of 51 years his last earthly thoughts were of his life spent battling against the North Wind and the God of the Sea:

Tho’ Boreas’ blasts and Neptune’s waves
Have tost me to and fro,
But now at length by God’s decree
I harbour here below.

Altho’ at anchor here I lie
With many of our Fleet,
Yet once again I must set sail
My Saviour Christ to meet.

This thought must have carried some resonance for Annie McQuoid almost two centuries later. When she departed this life in 1894 in her 88th year, and clearly as a tribute to her Master Mariner husband, George, who had died thirty years earlier, she copied the verse almost word for word.

Three years before his own death John Brown had this simple verse cut into a new family stone. It is in remembrance of his son who died, only 29 years of age, in “1830 of the Christian aera”:

Let sculptor’d monumental piles proclaim
The fam’d achievements of the learn’d and great.
On this plain stone ’tis ours to etch Brown’s name
To laud his virtues and to mourn his fate.

Another headstone with a maritime connection is the one owned by the Saul family. Francis Saul was the owner of Donaghadee’s Rope Walk on the stretch of foreshore immediately south of Shore Street Church in the early years of the nineteenth century.9 We must assume that it was he who composed this wonderfully nautical poem as a tribute to his father:

Beneath this stone lies Daniel Saul
Who round the world’s terraqueous ball
Has sailed to every land was known
Now under hatches lies at home.

Anchor’d among his kindred mould
Dreads neither storms nor seas that roll
Brought to by death’s correcting rod
Sets sail again to meet his God.

The stone most usually recognized as the churchyard’s oldest now stands proudly on the immediate north side of the church after many years on its face. It commemorates a Jean Mackgwear who was the wife of Alexander Milling. According to the inscription she, “lived wel and died wel,” something any reader might wish, until her death in 1660. Her father-in-law, Archibald Milling died some eight years after Jean. There is little known of this man but he was clearly one of Donaghadee’s first entrepreneurs, with a number of his own houses and ships. His stone is completed with what might be termed a witty carving of a millstone and a bird. Once again it was probably the son who composed the tribute, since it certainly could not have come from a book of verses. It seems a sentiment and an aspiration for a degree of immortality which many less articulate would have shared about their own dear departed, and one most suitable to end this description of Donaghadee churchyard:

Here Archibald Miling buried [lyes]

In hopes that at last he shall joyfully rise.

Blest in his children and welth heretofor

But he lately ceased happie . . .[any?] more.

By land and by sea well trusted and known

But Heaven was the haven he [aimed] at alone.

Both elements cary the effects of his panes

Proclaiming his industry great as his [gains].

His houses and barkes as well as his grave

Shows to win credit he nothing would save.

The [fruits] of his hand provided this st[one]

His good works will speak long after he’s gone.

Let his memory live tho’ his body be dead

And may his name flourish whilst this can be read.

1. The Rev. Andrew Stewart, Minister of Donaghadee, His History, as published with Adair’s Narrative, pp 313-314, quoted in G Hill (ed.), The Montgomery Manuscripts, (Belfast, 1869), p. 61, n. 48.
2. Historic Buildings in Donaghadee and Portpatrick, published by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society compiled by Hugh Dickson with Kenneth Kenmuir in Donaghadee (Belfast, 1976).
3. Newtown Walk by Thomas Merry and Donaghadee Walk by James Hunter, 4th September 1764, (Groves MSS, PRONI, T/808/15261). This was a form of census before the first official government census of 1801. Both compilers separately added notes, not only that there were, “No Papists” in Donaghadee, Ballywalter or Greyabbey, but that they had encountered no convents, chapels or places of Popish worship anywhere in the Barony.
4. Belfast and Ulster Street Directory, 1843 and 1846, First Presbyterian Church Register of Baptisms and First Valuation of Properties, Donaghadee Parish, 1834.
5. Letter from James Arbuckle to the Marquis of Downshire, 18 October 1796 (Downshire Papers, PRONI, D/607/D/240).
6. Letter from Humphrey Galbraith to Edward Hull, 11 June 1798, (Downshire Papers, PRONI, D/607/F/235)
7. Belfast Newsletter, 17 July 1798
8. Memorials of the Dead, II, 62.
9. Ordnance Survey Town Plan of Donaghadee and Pigot’s Street and Business Directory, 1825.