Phil Gibbons of Carnlough

For generations, Carnlough folk have had real affection for their harbour, together with its Low or Old Pier. The latter protected their fishing and pleasure craft from the fierce north easterly gales of winter, and indirectly the jobs of many by the security it gave those visiting vessels, which regularly called for loads of local limestone. The High or New Pier belonged to the “Company”, but the Old Pier was regarded as almost public property.

During the last year however, villagers have watched the Low Pier disappear. A new and larger one, immediately to the north has replaced it. None of us will be here to know if this new one outlasts the hundred and eighty odd years that Phil Gibbons’ pier survived, but we do know that it cost a lot more that the £1,200 Phil paid for his.

Phil Gibbons’ Arrival and Marriage.

As long as anyone can remember there has always been a Phil Gibbons in the village. Phil was a name handed down from father to son ever since the Gibbonses came to these parts. That was in the 1780’s when the first Phil, the one who built the pier, came from Westport, County Mayo, to Glenarm. There he met and married Ann Stewart, alias Robinson, daughter of Nicholas Stewart, land agent to Alexander, fifth Earl of Antrim. Stewart was a man of considerable property, the bulk of which he left to Anne when he died in 1781. As he had other natural offspring in the village, Anne found herself in several cases of litigation over the question of her inheritance. To avoid the unpleasantness of living amongst neighbours with whom she was at law, she and Phil moved out of Glenarm and took up residence at the Curragh or Carnlough North, a townland further down the coast, which she had inherited.

Phil’s Court Leet Services.

The little we know of Phil Gibbons is largely gleaned from the minute books of the Glenarm Court Leet, now deposited in the Northern Ireland Public Records Office in Belfast. The Court Leet might be compared with the present day district council. It met twice a year at Easter and Michaelmas, in the upper chamber of Glenarm Court House. It was presided over by the manor seneschal, an office held by Nicholas Stewart from 1750 to 1774. Instead of a council of elected members there was a jury of fifteen local landowners who by the terms of their leases, were bound to do a “suit and service”, including attendance at the Court Leet. The minutes of each session were carefully recorded, together with a list of attending jurymen in order of importance. Sums of money were “presented” and then levied for each specific job to be undertaken, were it a road repair, bridge building or whatever. The money was placed in the hands of the nearest or ablest landowner, who had then to oversee the job and report on its satisfactory completion.

Phil Gibbons’ name first appeared as a Glenarm juryman (No.3) on the 8th of October 1788. This means that he had already married Anne Stewart and in doing so had become a local landowner. During the next twenty-five years he attended the court Leet forty times. His name generally appeared first, second or third, on the jury list only twice did it fall as low as double figures! So he must have been regarded as one of the leading landowners in the district. Many of the jurymen appeared to have done little in the way of undertaking local projects: not so Phil. From the beginning he showed himself as ready to do what he could to forward the interests of the locality. From 1791 to 1795 he acted as Sparrow Master for the parish of Ardclinis. This was a thankless task. In order to control the sparrows, then a veritable pest invading all the corn crops, the Court Leet offered a shilling a dozen for dead birds. Those claiming the award were required to show their gory evidence to the local Sparrow Master who paid them accordingly there and then, and later drew a reimbursement at the next Court Leet. In May 1794, £1 was paid to Phil for cleaning out road bunkers in Ardclinis and in November of the same year he was paid £3-2-0 “for making a footpath along the garden wall from the Bridge to the Church (in Glenarm) 23 perches and five feet wide faced with stone and sufficiently gravelled.”(1) A court Leet minute for October 1806 reads, “we present the sum of £7-19-3 to be levied of the Parish of Ardclinis and paid to Phil Gibbons Esq. For the purpose of building a parish pound between the Point of Garron and Carnlough.” As water was an essential for whatever livestock may be impounded, Phil had the pound built on his own land in Carnlough North at that spot a tiny stream flowed across (now under) what is still known as Pound Loaning. Two years later £13 pounds were paid to the Rev. Alex. Montgomery and Mr Gibbons “to repair 60 perches of road leading from the sea at Carnlough Bridge to the mountain of Harphall.” In October 1812, George Halloran, Joseph Hunter and Phil Gibbons were to superintend the pulling down of the courthouse steeple in Glenarm which had become dangerous, the sum of £11 7s 6d being levied on the Barony and paid to Phil Gibbons. No doubt as to which of the three was going to be responsible for doing the job. Phil’s name as a juryman appeared for the last time on 2nd April, 1814.

The Low Pier.

There was a period of about a decade (1795-1806) during which Phil undertook no activity on behalf of the Court Leet. It was probably during this interval that he built the Low Pier in Carnlough. He was already quarrying Limestone at Creggan behind his farm at The Curragh and drawing it down the Croft Road by cart to the sea.(2) There had been a lime kiln the remains of which may still be seen above the Coast Road immediately above the Harbour Cottage. It was here, close by and still on his own property, that he built his pier. From it he could readily ship his limestone and also the produce of his kiln and his farm.(3)

The Ordnance Survey Memoirs for the parish of Ardclinis, written in 1835, some twenty years after his death, describe the Pier as being “200ft. long and 20ft. wide…but has been for some years in a state of dilapidation. Small vessels carrying from 15 to 20 tons can come up to this quay.” Curiously the memoirs ascribe the building of the Pier to a Mr. Phillips, but the Rev. R.S. Dobbs in his survey of the parishes of Ardclinis and Layd, written in 1817 within a couple of years of Phil’s death, leaves us in no doubt that the quay was “made by the late Mr. Philip Gibbons at his own expense; it cost £1200 and though it is not of much use at present as there is no trade, the intention was laudable, and it may be of service hereafter.”

Though the pier seems to have been neglected from the time of Phil’s death until the building of the High Pier forty years later, it subsequently furnished the Harbour Basin with much needed shelter. It withstood the ravages of the sea and protected the slipway where later lay the dredger, launch and hopper, all three so essential to the successful operation of Carnlough harbour during the height of its prosperity. The pier’s final service was to act as a caisson during 1981 while the inner facing of the new enlarged pier was carried out.

Phil’s Church Affiliations.

Though married to a Protestant, Phil was almost certainly a Roman Catholic. When he arrived in the district Catholics had no place of worship other than around the various local mass rocks. Before he died however, chapels had been erected at both Glenarm and Carnlough, at Feystown in 1810 and the Bay in 1808 respectively. Unfortunately there are no records to show whether or not Phil Gibbons contributed to the building of either of them. Both were pretty primitive constructions and were shortly replaced by more stable structures, at Feystown in 1828 and at Carnlough in 1846.

By 1800, the poor in the parish of Tickmacrevan (Glenarm) had become so numerous that a fund of over £34 was established for their support. According to the Select Vestry minutes for the 28th of April a committee was appointed to see its proper distribution, which included the minister, churchwardens and eight others, of whom Phil Gibbons was one. On two other occasions that year he attended meetings in the parish church in the same connection. And again, the parish church accounts reveal that Phil made a donation to a similar fund in July 1812. These entries show that he was alive to the needs of others and ready to work together for the common

The exact date of his death is uncertain, but we know that on the 14th March 1815, Carnlough Freemasons met “…to inter the body of our deceased Worshipful Brother Phillip Gibbons.” The burial took place in the now disused graveyard at Templeoughter within the Castle estate at Glenarm where, thirty-four years earlier his father-in-law, Nicholas Stewart had been buried. Five years later Phil’s widow Anne, directed in her will that she too wished to be buried there by his side.

Phil’s Immediate Successors.

Unfortunately Anne did not provide him with an heir, a matter which Phil saw for himself fairly early on during their marriage. His natural son Thomas, married Isabella McKillop of Gortnagory, where their children, Philip and Jane were born and reared.(5) In 1838, Philip (1813-1890) married Jane, daughter of the Rev. Alexander Montgomery, minister of the Presbyterian congregation in Glenarm.(6) Their second daughter, Elizabeth, married George Porteous, head gardener and later land Steward at Garron Tower. (7) It may have been he, with his knowledge of real estate, who encouraged his wife to discover what became of the property in Westport, which her great grandfather, the first Phil, should have inherited.

From Volume 10, The Glynns, 1982.