Islandmagee is a part of Antrim that is often missed by people who write about the glorious Antrim Coast Road. It's not really an island, but a peninsula starting at the northern entrance to Belfast Lough at Blackhead, and ending about nine miles north. It is at most two miles wide. Until recently more or less a Scots-Irish enclave, broad accents, with many of the smallholders making their living as seamen. Quiet. Modest. A pleasant family holiday place in the bucket-and-spade days. Don't know about it in the dot com age. Anyway it was the setting for a great outbreak of witchcraft among these modest, even diffident people. Dixon Donaldson, the historian of Islandmagee, reminds us that "the ancient Hebrews believed in it [Witchcraft] as a power of the evil one" and tells us that the Old Testament saw it as a crime to be punished by death. He takes us through the outlook of the churches through the ages quoting John Wesley as saying, "I would burn them all".
Anyway, to Islandmagee in the year 1710 and Mrs John Hattridge of Knowehead House. It's a complicated story but the central figure is Mary Dunbar, a relative who had come to keep the Hattridge family company after the death of a relative in mysterious circumstances; with apparitions, odd occurrences like hails of stones being thrown at the woman of the house as she sat by her fireside, the appearance of a mysterious boy in odd attire and bearing a sword who flew over a hedge like a bird and disappeared. Mary Dunbar had such strange fits and visions that clergymen and neighbours came to the conclusion that she was being bewitched. When Mary came out of her fits she said some women had been at her bedside tormenting her and named them. More women were named as Mary Dunbar continued to have fits. On one occasion when a woman came to see her, Mr Sinclair, the clergyman, sang the 142nd Psalm. Miss Dunbar was seized with convulsions and her tongue seemed to double back in her throat. "On recovering she was able to take a draught of beer."
Seven women named by Mary Dunbar as her tormentors were tried at Carrickfergus on March 31st, 1711. One judge wanted to acquit the women, the other was for conviction. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty. The women were given twelve months imprisonment with four appearances in the public pillory. A Mercier paperback Witchcraft in Ireland by Patrick Byrne has a good account of this. The other book, The History of Islandmagee, was printed in 1927 from a series of articles in The Whitehead News and Ballycarry and Islandmagee Reporter, published by the same.