This weeks townland is the smallest in Comber parish and indeed is one of the smallest in County Down, situated out the Newtownards Road just outside Comber. Glassmoss is also a relatively recent name only coming into use in the 19th century with the neighbouring Longlands and Glassmoss thought to be Ballynaganemye, believed to come from the Irish Baile na Gainimhe Baile meaning “townland of the sand”.
Given its small size it is no wonder there are no sites of archaeological interest, however there are the remains of a level crossing from the old BCDR Comber to Donaghadee line on the small section of the Ballyhenry Road within Glassmoss. Only three households appear on the 1901 & 1911 census within Glassmoss, all with a farming/agriculture background:- the Shields, Hendersons & Gibson's.
Glassmoss was also controversially considered for the site of the Comber's New Cemetery in the 1880s which Desi Rainey has explored within his blog earlier this year. The controversy surrounding this townland doesn't end there with a curious and strange publication published by the Orange Order in 1885 entitled 'Burial of the Radical cause in the Glassmoss' by Robert Todd, Comber. This is a political pamphlet including a poem concerning the 1885 election, ridiculing the Liberal Candidate, John Shaw Brown and his defeat. This poem is described by the seller on Abebooks as 'A clumsy parody of Charles Wolfe's 'The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna' and it is for sale if someone has $200 and wants to own the original!
To finish, I include the poem in full below- interesting to note the references to the Glassmoss sand as suggested by the original name of Ballynaganemye.
The Burial of the Radical Cause in the Glassmoss [by Robert Todd, Comber]
Not a prayer was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his corse to the Glassmoss we hurried,
Not a Liberal discharged his fareweel shot
Where the Radical done Brown lay buried.
We buried him hastily on Tuesday night;
The sods with our hackle-pins turning;
By the struggling Glassmoss cottage light;
And Conservatives bonfires burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast'
In a newspaper shroud we wound him,
On a Northern Whig we laid him to rest,
With United Ireland wrapt round him.
Few and short were the prayers we said;
Yet we sighed 'neath a load of sorrow,
As we gazed on the skeleton Liberal dead,
And thought on the cheers of to-morrow.
We thought we scratched out his sandy bed,
and smoothed down his whin-blossom pillow,
How the ass and the he-goat would tread o'er his head
And the cattle around it would bellow.
Lightly they'll talk of the seat he has lost,
But it's hardly worth while to upbraid him,
And little they'll think of the money it cost
To place him where Liberals have laid him.
But half of our mournful task was done,
When we thought it was time for retiring,
And we heard, 'mid the boom of the big Orange drum
The Conservative squibs they were firing.
Quickly we dibbled him there close at hand
From the field of his shame newly taken,
We laid him deep down in the soft-running sand,
For we know he will never awaken.
VERDICT:
Died, a natural death from speedy mortification, on Tuesday , 1st December, 1885;
after a protracted struggle for a precarious existence in the unpropitious climate
of North Down. Its atmosphere proved unfavourable to his weak and shattered
constitution; he succumbed to his fate, being the last of his race in these parts;
he is lamented by few; he was the victim of a policy as vacillating and unstable
as the Glassmoss sand to which he is consigned without hope of a resurrection.
Signed, McCullough's Mule, Coroner, Glassmoss
EPITAPH
'Neath Glassmoss sand;
Not far from land,
In far famed County Down.
His body lies,
No more to rise,
Because it was down Brown.
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