Visitor centres and the like abound in Ireland now, and well worth a visit many are. A new one is planned for a site just outside Belfast, its origins in a book written just under 20 years ago by that fine chronicler Brian Walker and published by Blackstaff: Sentry Hill. Walker published many slim picture-books of the north in the Friar's Bush Imprint. He is now director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's, Belfast and also chairman of the Arts Council for the North. The new idea, based on his book, is a Sentry Hill museum and visitor centre in the very house of Walker's book. Newtownabbey Borough Council has acquired the house, just outside Glengormley (not so far from Donegore Motte, where the United Irishmen gathered in 1798 and where Samuel Ferguson is buried). According to the newsletter of the Linen Hall Library, "an inspired decision". It is expected that the house, along with its associated collections, will provide "the most complete illumination anywhere of the life and broad-ranging interests of a middle-ranking Presbyterian farming family from the late 18th century almost to the present day, but in particular those of the great patriarch of the family, William Fee McKinney, who lived most of the 19th century."
The Linen Hall Library in Belfast, that shining light and companionable centre in the heart of the city, has been given a grant, too, by the same borough council to assist with the cataloguing and conservation of the approximately 1,500 books in the library's Sentry Hill collection. Seamus Delargy would surely be delighted to see his fellow countrymen and women so engaged in recalling and recording even their recent past. The opening lines of the preface to the book, by the way, are: "In 1976 I was invited by Conor O'Clery of The Irish Times to look at a collection of old photographs which had recently been brought to his attention. The visit to Whitehead in Co Antrim which followed revealed a number of fascinating photographs of country life at the turn of the century. More importantly, however, the trip resulted in another visit, this time to the family home of the owner of the collection at Sentry Hill, Carnmoney."
It was to open the door on to the home and life of a very remarkable family. It has often been said, here and elsewhere, that local historians are most valuable to the country. The main figure in this is William Fee McKinney (1932-1917), who not only kept diaries, unusual among busy farming people, but records of local organisations he belonged to: the reading club, the temperance society, the dispensary and church committees. He kept tram tickets and receipts and built up a collection of photographs of life on the farm and around. The Borough Council has done a good job.