St Colman's Catholic Church, Barnmeen

Image: © Eric Jones Taken: 27 Oct 2011

This church, dating from 1760, is the oldest of three in the parish Drumgath. and the oldest church in the Catholic Diocese of Dromore. It stands on a religious and cultural fracture zone. The tablet on the outside wall commemorates an earlier parish school burnt to the ground by the Black and Tans in 1921. A century earlier, as a commemorative window behind the altar reminds us, five men from the village, known as the Barnmeen Martyrs, were hung at Downpatrick Jail and another two transported to Australia after a kangaroo trial for the murder of Samuel Duncan, a Rathfriland Protestant who, on All Souls Day 1819, returning home from the races a little worse for wear was unwise enough to shout insults against the Pope. Some person unknown gave him an almighty thump from which he never recovered. http://www.lisburn.com/books/dromore-diocese/parish-drumgath.html

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