Greyabbey features in next Mahon’s Way on UTV

Joe Mahon returns to UTV on Sunday night at 7.30pm with ‘Mahon's Way’ and he’s in Greyabbey, Co. Down, exploring the village’s rich history and not so well-known places and spaces.

Joe finds out through many of the locals he meets that they prefer to call it “Greba.”

Joe also learns about its many layers of history and pre-history, about the abbey that gives the village its name, about the Anglo Normans, the Cistercian monks and eventually about the Montgomerys who gave the area its Ulster-Scots identity.

In 1606, Sir Hugh Montgomery, and a scholar named Sir James Hamilton, began their own private plantation by settling some 10,000 lowland Scots in the north and east of county Down.

In the company of historian and genealogy expert, William Roulston, Joe visits the magnificent ruin of Greyabbey founded over 800 years ago by Affreca, the wife of the Anglo-Norman knight John de Courcy, in the grounds of which can still be found a record embedded in stone of the generations that have been buried beneath its towering, roofless nave.

Later, Joe gets pleasantly lost in a place called ‘Greba Gardens’, created by Richard and Beverley Brittain when they transformed an old disused quarry on the outskirts of Greyabbey, into a meandering, mazy, mossy wonderland.

Using the existing contours of the land, a lot of ingenuity and imagination, they have created ponds and pathways and stone walls and bridges, and beautiful little unexpected vistas around every corner.

Joe finds out how they have ingeniously, and at times fortuitously, re-cycled wood and rock and even the soil of a discarded football pitch from down the road!

Mahon's Way is produced by Westway Film Productions for UTV, and supported by Northern Ireland Screen’s Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund.

The series is sponsored by Warmflow Engineering. You can watch this episode on Sunday 25th September at 7.30pm on UTV and afterwards on catch up on www.itv.com/utvprogrammes

Last week's episode from Garvagh was postponed and has now been rescheduled to Sunday 6 November

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