This would be a good time to visit Donegore, near Templepatrick, with the trees greening and the birds in full song, to pay your respects to the poet of whom Yeats wrote: "Nor may I less be counted one/ With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson". And if you are in a mind to study the history of the various risings of 1798, you could note that the Ordnance Survey Memoir has it that "the inhabitants of Donegore took a conspicuous part, by joining almost to a man .. . and they were the first to commence the attack in the town of Antrim on the 7th June, for a day or two previous to which they were encamped on Donegore Hill."
Sir Samuel Ferguson is buried in the church graveyard. So many of his poems are translated from the Irish: The Fair Hills of Ireland, Deirdre's Lament for the Sons of Usnach, but there is one poem which comes to mind particularly in this year: Lament for Thomas Davis, and some of it has a resonance for today. You'll remember the opening lines: "I walked through Ballinderry in the springtime,/When the bud was on the tree" - and he goes on to compare the sowers of the seed "in every fresh-ploughed field" to the work of Davis. Likewise, when he sat by Ballyshannon in the summer and saw the salmon leap, that too symbolised for him Davis striving onward to the calm, clear streams above.
His last verse brings home something of what is being aspired to today by many people on this island: "O brave young men, my love, my pride, my promise,/'Tis on you my hopes are set,/In manliness, in kindliness, in justice,/To make Erin a nation yet;/Self-respecting, self-relying, self-advancing,/ In union or in severance, free and strong,/And if God grant this, then, under God, to Thomas Davis/Let the greater praise belong!" John Hume wrote something in his recent book about the solution to our problems, when it came, being nothing like anything we have foreseen.
The authors of the Survey Memoir observed that "the locals here are very uncommunicative and even in the lowest grade, in no way outwardly evince any respect for their superiors or for those on whom they may be dependent for their support." There was no place of worship for Catholics and "no gentlemen's seats in the parish". The mound - or moat, some call it - is not high, but the flatness of the Antrim countryside gives splendid views in clear weather. And similarly, the survey claims that the moat itself may be distinguished from points 25 miles west of it.