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| 13 May 2008
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SION MILLS VILLAGE
 Sion Mills could be a heritage asset on a par with the Giant’s Causeway and of national importance – even of international importance as the only Irish Linen Spinning Mill and village to be saved for the benefit of the public. The village, unique in Ireland because of the style of its buildings, is very accessible on the main Londonderry to Dublin road, with regular Express Coaches stopping in the village to and from Derry and Letterkenny, Co Donegal to Dublin and Belfast.
Sion Mills is situated on the River Mourne, one of the best salmon and sea trout rivers in Europe (part of the Foyle System) The river feeds Herdmans Mill’s hydro-electric plant, which supplies the National Grid.
The village grew up around the growth of the Mill itself. It was intended as a model village with a model, mill-workers community. Started with New Row (now Main Street) in 1835, by the end of the 19th century it had 240 houses. There are now 41 listed buildings and the heart of the village was made a Conservation Area in 1977.
 The village streets were built in the style of the vernacular cottages of that time, but in terraces. There are now 4 streets of the old terraced cottages - Church Square, Main Street, Albert Place and New Street. The village has grown greatly around these and there are about 3000 inhabitants of Sion Mills and the Glebe. There are 3 townlands which meet in the centre of Sion Mills - Seein (hill of the fairies) from which Sion takes its name (pronounced Sion not Zion); Liggartown and Ballyfatton. The Mill is in Liggartown.
In the early days of the village, the Herdmans, who were Presbyterian, encouraged everyone to attend church and this, we understand was held in a house in the village until the Presbyterian Church was built in 1866. In 1884, a small Church of Ireland, St Saviour's, was built by William Unsworth but never consecrated. This was because in 1909 the magnificent Byzantine style church, also built by Unsworth, was completed - the Church of the Good Shepherd. In 1964, the nissan hut which had served as a Chapel was replaced by Patrick Haughey's RC Church of St Theresa. All three of these churches are listed buildings. In front of the Church of the Good Shepherd is the burial place of Brig General Ambrose Ricardo, who, with Emerson Tennent Herdman of Sion House (his brother-in-law) instigated its foundation. There is  an interesting memorial over the grave, which is listed B+. The Herdman family had also matched the congregation pound for pound when the Presbyterian Church was built. Hanging in the Church of the Good Shepherd is the drum of the 9th Bn the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (The Tyrones), the regiment raised by Ambrose Ricardo at the beginning of World War 1 and whose men were largely wiped out at the Battle of the Somme.
Surrounding the Mill and village are:
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River walks and beach
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Nature walk along route of old railway
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Sporting facilities – bowling green, tennis courts, 2 football pitches and famous cricket field where West Indies team were all out for 25 runs against Ireland in 1969.
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Angling facilities - including disabled angling - on the River Mourne; one of the best salmon and sea trout rivers in Europe.
The History of Cricket in Sion Mills
125 NOT OUT (written in 1989)
Cricket Prologue
Twenty cricket seasons have gone past since a West Indies test team visited Sion Mills and fell victim to Ireland in a one-day game at the Holm Field. For further details of this historic and famous match, visit the following website.
Read More
The Holm Field is not a Sabina Park, a Lords or an Adelaide Oval, but now and again over the past 125 years it has decked itself out, complete with the trappings of big cricket, with its stands and television facilities, to play host to a first class game.
On more modest days it has become the arena for  North-West cricket within which batsmen have struggled against bowler for supremacy and from which visiting teams have either left victoriously or vanquished, all of which depended much on the form of the village cricketers. Above all, the ground was a “circus” in Roman terms, where men’s athleticism was put to the test with long days in the field, with wickets to be taken and runs to get. The centuries and the double centuries scored in the Holm Field are fitting testimonies to the latter.
On quieter evenings, Christian clergymen would have taken time off from theology and busied themselves in the rivalry of the game of cricket of a diocesan cult to the accompaniment of the hum of industry from the mill. The mill chimney, as it has done for many years, would stand sentinel over these tranquil pursuits.
Bad Light Stopped Play
Three decades, give or take a year, after Herdmans started spinning linen year at Sion in 1835, the village fielded its first cricket team. Just who played cricket for the village team in those early days would be pure conjecture. Seeng the village as a form of infill development between Seein and Ballyfatton, it is very likely it was the indigenous inhabitant of Ballyfatton who made his way down the brae to the flour mill and the linen mill, who was the first to play cricket. McGraths, McGonigles and McCreas lived in that early settlement, and their names continue to emerge in the annals of Sion cricket with frequent regularity. They may be seen as village stock supplementing the gentry who sponsored the game in those distant days and who continue to do so until the present day.
Almost a quarter of a century of cricket in Sion has to be accounted for before its name appears as league and cup winners in 1888 when the game became organised under the auspices of the North-West Cricket Union as it is known till today.
 Cricket is reported to have been played at Sion House demesne during the 1860s. Sion House would have perhaps looked like Camus house as seen today, with its long sweeping drive, with parkland on either side. Such would have been the typical setting for cricket matches, Irish style, when the game formed a social focus for the surrounding landlords and the elite of the “big houses”.
One may not be far wrong in thinking those early cricket matches would have been played against teams like Raphoe and Convoy. Raphoe had one of the earliest Royal Schools, whose masters would have learnt the game in England, in an English school setting. Convoy would have been a little like Sion, having forsaken the cottage-type woollen industry for factory methods. Strabane had yet to appear as a centre for cricket. It was some 20 years after Sion that it did, and when it blossomed it represented the professional and business classes which, together with the garrison teams, completed as it were, the social structure of cricket around Sion.
By the 1850s the railway would have pushed out from Derry and passed between the original Mill and Sion House. During the 1880s the mill was extended both upwards, and westwards in the direction of the railway, leaving a no-man’s land which was eventually occupied by the tennis courts and bowling green and what remains of the railway sidings.
During the same period Sion House was redesigned and rebuilt, which probably marked the end of cricket in the demesne. A new home had to be found for the game. Once more the generosity of the Herdman family was evident as was their great love for the game. This new ground became affectionately known as the Holm Field, being alongside the river. Not only has it played host to generations of cricketers, it has also served as a setting for athletic events on sports days, lawn tennis and bowls, long before the present facilities were constructed. Its geography defines the northern limits of the present mill.
Social History of Sion Mills
The Herdman brothers, James, John and George, who came from Belfast to found the Mill in 1835 to be near the flax-fields of the North-West, were certainly influenced by Robert Owen, and began their own version of his social experiment in building the village and the  community of workers for the Mill. They also, like Owen, believed in education and not only educated the children, but also had evening classes for adults. There was a village band as early as 1842 and George Herdman ran singing-classes for the girls who worked in the Mill. Unlike Owen, they were religious, and built the Churches (although for the first 30 years everyone attended Church together in a converted building in the village – and James Herdman used to beat a drum to call the people to church). They also believed in temperance for the workers and until 1896, when they lost a court case, there was no public house allowed in the village. The Mill Diary kept by James Herdman from 1842 onwards gives a fascinating insight into the social aspects of the mill and the village, besides giving much technical detail of the business of flax-spinning.
A diary has been kept ever since by Herdmans Limited, which was still spinning flax 170 years on, in the most modern flax-spinning mill in the world, built in 1989 immediately to the south of the Old Mill, and employing 600 people.  At its height the Old Mill employed 1500 people. Unfortunately, due to competition from China which has cornered the whole production of linen in Europe, Herdmans Ltd closed down all production in Sion Mills over 2 years, finally closing for good in 2004, with the loss of 600 jobs. Over the centuries the Mill had had good times and bad, sometimes with the future looking very black, but had always bounced back. When the end finally came, although the writing had been on the wall for some years, it came as a real shock to the employees and to the village community who found it hard to believe that the central pivot of village life for 170 years and 6 or more generations was gone for good.
Going back 170 years to the beginnings of Sion Mills village, from the diary we learn that there was a gasworks in the Mill in 1840 and in 1842 pipes were laid to the village so that every house had a light, the shop had 4 lights and there were street lights. Later, the Mill installed DC turbines to light the Mill, the village, Sion House and Camus Rectory. Sion House, built by the Herdmans in 1846, was designed by Charles Lanyon of Lanyon Lynn & Lanyon and altered in 1888 by William E Unsworth (a pupil of Lutyens who married the sister of Emerson Tennent Herdman) to a 50 room house in Elizabethan Revival style. Unsworth also designed many of the buildings in the village including the Mens Institute (now the Recreation Club) and the large Church of the Good Shepherd in 1909 in Byzantine style and modelled on a church in Pistoia, Tuscany. The style of the Main Mill and the layout of the village, was, according to tradition, influenced by Titus Salt, but we can find no written record of his involvement. By the end of the 19th Century, there were 240 workers houses in the village, and a population of over 2000.
It was the time of the first potato famine when the Herdmans came and work in the Mill must have provided relief for the poor people of the area. Indeed, in 1840, in the account of Mr & Mrs Hall’s visit to Ireland, they wrote the following:
“In the County Tyrone, and within a distance of little more than three miles from Strabane, is to be found one of the most interesting establishments it has ever been our good fortune to visit in any country. We have inspected manufactories of much greater extent than the “Sion Mills”, but have never witnessed with greater gratification the practical and efficient working of a fine moral system. . . . . . . . Instead of the hot furnace, long chimneys, and dense smoke, rendering still more unhealthy the necessarily close atmosphere of manufactories devoted exclusively to the spinning of flax and tow into linen yarn, there is a clean, handsome, well-ventilated building, where nearly seven hundred of a peasantry, which, before the establishment of this manufactory were starving and idle – not from choice but necessity – are now constantly employed; and the air is as pure and as fresh as on the borders of the wildest prairie, or the boldest coast. A NEW SOCIAL ORDER: The bare fact of such a population being taught industrious habits and receiving full remuneration for their time and labour, is a blessing, . . . . . . . . this system of social order and social industry is not the only advantage enjoyed by Sion Mills. Cottages, of simple construction, but sound and comfortable, have been built for the workers and their families; a school is established, and to the Sunday school the Messrs Herdman themselves attend, taking the greatest interest in the educational progress of their workpeople and distributing motives to improvement, lavishly and judiciously. . . . . . . . A HEALTHY  POPULATION: We visited several of the factory dwellings, and found that, in many instances, they combined the small comforts of town rooms with the peculiar advantages of country cottages. We never saw a more healthy population, and the watchful care of the proprietors has effectually prevented the growth of immorality supposed to be inseparable from the “factory system”. . . . . . . .The factory in the wilds of Tyrone was so perfectly what we had often desired to see established and prospering in Ireland, that we have dwelt upon it longer than may be interesting to all our readers, though the safe working of such a system carries so much moral influence with it – induces such genuine prosperity – that we have been more than commonly anxious to satisfy our English readers of the proof being in existence, that, in a particularly wild district in the North of Ireland, capital may be safely and advantageously invested to any amount, and peasantry found, not only to work, but to understand the respect due to property, and the advantage which it gives where it is diffused.”
 In the 1847 famine, there is a series of letters from James & George Herdman to their brother John in Belfast which tell how they coped with keeping their workers and families alive in very difficult circumstances. The devotion of the Herdman family to their workers and the villagers until the village houses were sold off to their occupants for between £60 and £180 each in the early 1960s, is well known in the area and much respected. The legacy of the villagers living, working and going to school together persists and the new state primary school which superseded the Mill School in the 1970s was the first integrated state school in Northern Ireland.
In 1929, the following article appeared in the Belfast newspaper The Northern Whig, and sums up well the social heritage of Sion Mills:
Northern Whig – 29 Sept 1929
“A Self—Contained Community”
An industrial village, comprising a factory with surrounding dwellings for its directors and workers, is no uncommon sight in England, but it is not so often met in Ireland, which is, in the main, an agricultural country. Of course, within a radius of twenty or thirty miles of Belfast, they are sufficiently numerous; but these really are so intimately connected with that great manufacturing centre that they may almost be classed in the same category as similar concerns in the city.
As an out-and-out “country” industry it would be hard to find a better example than the Flax Spinning Mill and Village of Messrs Herdmans Ltd at Sion Mills, Co Tyrone.
No chance visitor, passing through by rail or road, can fail to be struck by the tidy, flourishing appearance of the houses, streets, and inhabitants.
The village consists of some two hundred and fifty houses, which are kept constantly up-to-date and in good repair. There are billiard and reading rooms, schools, places of worship for all members of the community. The directors live in the midst of their people, and are in personal touch with all who may desire to approach them. Of course all sorts of sports are encouraged. The workers themselves give weekly subscriptions to the “Amalgamated Sports Club”, which subscriptions entitle the subscriber to take part in any or all games, and to the use of the reading and billiard rooms. The fund is run entirely by a committee of their own, a considerable addition to the balance being provided by a cinema, which is shown weekly during the winter in the large recreation hall.
There are a resident doctor and nurse – both similarly paid for by workers’ contributions.
Seeing so large a concern as this running so smoothly, it is but natural to turn one’s mind to the beginning of things. How, when and why was flax spinning started in the very heart of the country?
IN THE BEGINNINGS
In the year 1835, two brothers, James and John Herdman, who already had a small mill in Winetavern Street, Belfast, decided to start another spinning industry in the country. What seems to have started them on their quests was a desire to use water-power. Presumably in those days steam power was extravagant and undeveloped. At any rate they chose Sion (having considered Ballyshannon) – both places had water-power waiting to be harnessed. Three things seem to have decided them to adopt Sion – Firstly, the nearness to the port of Derry; secondly, the fact that they would be in the heart of a flax-growing district; and thirdly, the fact that the Marquis of Abercorn had dug a water-course to his corn mill at Sion. Eventually they bought the whole concern, leased the surrounding land, converted the buildings as they stood into a small spinning mill and spun their first hank of yarn on 14 November 1835.............
.........So it would be worth the while of anybody interested in self-contained industrial communities to pay a visit to Sion Mills. They will find a village whose inhabitants, though varying in creeds, live side by side, are taught as children in the same school, and work together daily in the Mill in peace and harmony. It has always been the policy of this firm to deal with all parties and creeds with absolute impartiality, and it is pleasing to record that this policy has been rewarded, and that through all the recent troublous time there has been not the faintest sign of unrest in the village of Sion Mills.”
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