William Harbi(n)son at Portmore/Laa Lau Graveyard, Ballinderry, Co. Antrim

The visit of Portmore graveyard was the adventure of our first weekend in Northern Ireland, back in October 2019. After visiting Derry the previous day and having a quick walk at the Giant's Causeway that morning, I somehow managed to convince Cédric to stop at Ballinderry "on the way back". Of course I had a specific reason for that; I wanted to find the grave of William Harbinson (or Harbison, which is the version I found in most accounts), former sergeant of the Royal Antrim Rifles and head centre of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Belfast. He was arrested under the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1866, died in prison in September 1867 before his trial, and was buried in his hometown of Ballinderry. Unfortunately, as was the case for Mitchel, most of the pictures disppeared with the phone they were taken with. But in this case I had very few pictures in the first place, because we had a much harder time finding the graveyard than we thought, and then we had to be quick because we needed to drive home and go to work next morning. But it still made for a very nice stroll in the Antrim countryside, and probably the most picturesquely Irish graveyard I have seen so far.

Before getting into the details of our adventure, I need to thank two fellow-historians without whom I might not even have known about Harbison. I know, I said in the "about" section this is not a research blog, so I will keep historiographic considerations to a minimum, but this is important. My thanks go to Breandán Mac Suibhne and Jim Smyth, who told me about William Harbison's funeral in Belfast and encouraged me to look into it. In the summer of 2016, I spent a month in Dublin to search the national Archives and identify as many Fenian funerals as I could in the period from 1858 to 1916. I had had contact with Breandán before because I had translated an article on the history and memory of the Famine into French, and chance had it he was also working in the National Archives that summer, and he introduced me to Jim Smyth. I had been working in the Archives for about three weeks and had found many (more or less detailed) references to Fenian funerals, but none of them in Belfast, so I was basically telling them nothing seemed to have happened there, and that's when they told me about Harbison. This is important because it shows how - even in pre-partition history - scholars tend to either completely overlook Ulster, or treat it separately. Since then, I have tried to find everything I could about him, and reviewed the sources I had read before, and I really can't get around how little there is about pre-partition republicans in Belfast. Most general histories of nationalism or republicanism seem to simply forget about it, and you need to look at articles dealing specifically with the North to find references to Harbison (and even in those it's not so frequent, as historians of Ulster tend to focus on Unionism, or on post-partition republicans). So basically, even though Harbison's funeral was a major event with thousands of participants, you will only find information about it if you already know it happened and you can narrow your search to the exact names, places and dates (and even then, it's not that easy).

But by October 2019, I knew enough about Harbison to go looking for his grave. I knew he was originally from Ballinderry, I knew he was buried there, and I knew from one newspaper report at the time that he was more specifically buried at Portmore graveyard, where part of the funeral procession acompanied the remains. And that's about it. Ballinderry is about 15 miles (24km) from Belfast, so not a tiny walk to take in procession. I was pretty impressed and supposed a man given such honour would be some kind of local superstar. I was about to get surprised. We parked the car in Upper Ballinderry and decided to look for the graveyard. The place looked so small, it would probably be easy to find. We found our first church pretty quickly, but there was no churchyard around it, and it looked Anglican (I later spotted a sign confirming it was). As we were about to leave, two people came out and after a short conversation one of them suggested taking us to another Church - with a graveyard - where the Reverend was just then. Knowing Harbison had been Catholic, I doubted the Anglican Reverend would have much information to share. Especially as he had also been a republican, which Anglicans in Northern Ireland tend to not be fans of. But there was not likely more than two churches in such a small village, so it was worth a try.

Speaking of Anglicans' view of republicans, we had a very short conversation in the car (the drive was no more than 2-3 minutes) during which I told our driver about my research. He was never aggressive or impolite, but the information about me working on republican funerals seemed to leave him completely indifferent. He simply did not seem to care and asked no questions, when so far I had been used to people either wanting to know more or having family annecdotes to share. So, no fan. As I had suspected, the Reverend could not help us much, but he was absolutely adorable and even took a look at his register to check if he had the name we were looking for around 1867. He did not. We still had a look around the churchyard, first because I like it anyway, and because who knows. But we could not find a William Harbison. So, we were coming from Upper Ballinderry and this place was called the "Middle Church" (I would find out later it was historically a Moravian church). Maybe we simply needed to go further down the road to Lower Ballinderry, maybe that was the Catholic part of town, and maybe we'd find the Catholic church and graveyard there.

And so we went. We got back to the car and drove to Lower Ballinderry where we saw a few houses, and not much more. That is when I noticed a sign saying Portmore Road. I had not really paid much attention then because I thought a Catholic graveyard in a tiny village would be easy to find, and now I remembered one of the accounts in a newspaper covering the funeral mentioned Portmore. But when I checked my Maps app, the road seemed to lead to a dead end. So I tried to find more information on the internet and found this interesting page about what is known in local folk memory as Laa Lau or Laa Loo: http://glenavyhistory.com/places-of-worship/ballinderry-places-of-worship/laa-loo-laa-lau/ (the page contains a few pictures, and there are more here: http://glenavyhistory.com/places-of-worship/ballinderry-places-of-worship/laa-loo-laa-lau-burials/). The description on this page seemed to confirm we should go along Portmore road, so we did. And to be honest I was a bit worried the whole time because it felt like we kept walking further away from the village to the middle of nowhere. Yet after about 20 minutes, we finally reached the gates of a small, round graveyard which was absolutely charming. It was enclosed by a short wall and trees, full of ivy and yew trees and old tombstones most of which were unreadable, and here is the only picture I have left of this enchanting place:

(yes my phone's camera had very green greens)

So now you must be thinking to yourself: "Hey, if she had to save just the one picture from that graveyard, why is it not one of the actual headstone?" Well, sorry to disappoint you, but we never found it. At one point, I was even unsure I got the place right because I could not imagine such an important local republican would not be commemorated. But I have since kept looking for information and it seems this is indeed the right place, but his grave is not marked. We did find a "Horbison", but not William and much earlier than 1867. I contacted the person responsible for the above-linked website, but never got a reply. And only recently I discovered another fascinating website about local history (but the latest post is from 2012 so I'm not very hopeful). It contains an article on Potmore graveyard, in which the author dwells at length on the Harbison/Horbison/Harbinson family, of local importance, and mentions the grave we had seen - that of Frances Horbison, buried in 1736, possibly an ancestor of William's? http://lisburn.com/history/digger/Digger-2009/digger-11-12-2009.html The author of the website, nicknamed "The Digger" (gotta love this), also wrote a page about William Harbison, where I got confirmation that his grave remains unmarked. http://lisburn.com/history/digger/Digger-2010/digger-29-01-2010.html His brother sought to erect a monument in the 1870s and 1880s, but never got permission for fear a republican headstone might create trouble. It seems William's grave is nearby the Horbison slab.

Even without a possibility to identify Harbison's grave precisely, a visit to Portmore graveyard is highly recommended, if only for its picturesque character and the nice walk to get there. And it is still a very old graveyard with other things to see, from ancient graves to mysterious holes in the ground to the remains of the old church (dedicated to Saint Lau, hence the name Laa Lau). And there are also strange round holes in two stones. These are called Ballaun stones, and legend has it the round holes are imprints left by Saint Patrick's knee as he knelt there in prayer. As for William Harbison, he does have a memorial, erected in 1912 at Milltown Catholic cemetery in Belfast :

I will write more about Milltown in a future post.