More info on the Aughlish Cottages

This comes from Raymond's County Down Website If your ancestors came from County Down or Armagh, this has got to be one of the best resources online and, thanks to the site owner, I now know that my Great Grandfather William McConville and Sarah McMorran were married on 25th January 1884!!!

Aughlish article is here

Auglish Cottages

This row of old weavers cottages near Scarva is one of the last of a fast disappearing breed.  Like the gate lodges that we are so fond of on this page, weavers cottages are relic of a bygone age that have outlived their usefulness in their original form and really play no part in modern society.  What makes these cottages so special, therefore, is the fact that they remain as a complete row, and, while some have been altered, they have all retained their original exterior shape, style and uniformity.  In other places where similar rows existed they have either fallen into disrepair and been demolished or been removed to make way for new development, such as at Dollingstown, Lurgan.  Where some have survived, they generally tend to have been renovated or modernised beyond all recognition.  Those that do remain tend nowadays to have a better chance of survival, as people are now more appreciative of buildings with character than they were a few years ago.  Originality now carries a premium.

The weaver’s cottage played a very important part in the linen industry.  While bleaching was the first of the processes to move into the mechanised world of the industrial revolution, with its huge factories and mills, in the mid to late 1700s, followed by spinning in the early 1800s, weaving was slow to follow suit.  The only major change that took place prior to 1850 was the control exercised by the bleachers that saw the role of the weaver move away from being an independent manufacturer, who grew his flax, spun his thread, wove his cloth and then took it to the brown linen market, to one of being a sub-contractor to the bleachers who supplied the thread and paid the weaver a wage for weaving the cloth.  The industry was still a cottage one but was now much more controlled and centralised and interested more in quantity than allowing for the individual artistry or craftsmanship of the weavers.  After 1850, the power loom system made great technological strides and by the 1870s had virtually rendered handloom weaving obsolete.

The unique design of the Aughlish Cottages with their steeply pitched roofs would have been to accommodate the hand looms, which were very bulky and quite high, although there is a story that they were built to this design on the whim of the wife of one of the Dukes of Manchester who had liked similar cottages that she had seen in Switzerland.  The Irish Linen Centre in Lisburn has some fine examples of looms and still does demonstrations of the handloom system, which can then be contrasted with the very latest power looms used in Thomas Ferguson and Co. in Banbridge.

How Aughlish Cottages got their more commonly known name of ‘Potstick Row’ is unclear, but I remember the late Ronnie Patton explaining that it seemed to be derived from the name ‘pluck stick’, one of the tools of the weavers art.     

Another information site can be found here

 

	This is the cottage where my father, Ernest McConville would have lived after he was born in 1928