placenamesShrigley
Srioglaí
Shrigley’s surviving memorial and preserved mill bell carry the history of an industrial village whose original streets were demolished.
The name
A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
- Srioglaí · Irish · main form
- Shrigley · English · main form
Place & story
A village built around work
John Martin built Shrigley as a model village for his cotton-mill workers in 1824. Two centuries later, the local community marked its foundation with historical panels installed in August 2024. The memory wall tells the story of a settlement whose original buildings have largely disappeared. Its creation reflects an effort to preserve workers' lives and family connections through public interpretation, rather than relying on the surviving architecture alone. [2]
The Martin Memorial
The Martin Memorial was erected in 1871 to honour the village's industrial benefactor. Designed by Timothy Hevey in a High Victorian style, it once stood within the mill village. Northern Ireland's heritage-at-risk record describes how demolition of the surrounding housing in the early 1970s, and replacement housing across the road, severed that setting. The isolated monument consequently records both nineteenth-century commemoration and the loss of the industrial streetscape that originally gave it context. [3]
The bell returned to the community
In 2023 the Housing Executive placed Shrigley's former mill bell on permanent loan to the Sir Hans Sloane Centre in nearby Killyleagh. It had once summoned workers to the mill and had been removed from the clock tower decades earlier. The handover brought together residents, centre staff and Housing Executive representatives. Their account connects the spinning mill with its later use as a tannery, preserving memories of successive generations' work through an object removed from its original setting. [4]
Geographic information
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Shrigley. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Shrigley Memory Wall: bicentenary panels, August 2024 · Killyleagh and Shrigley Community Connections
- John Martin Monument: Heritage at Risk, HB18/02/001 · Department for Communities, Northern Ireland
- Shrigley Bell Displayed in Hans Sloane Centre, 6 February 2023 · Jim Masson, Down News; Housing Executive and Sir Hans Sloane Centre statements
- John Martin Memorial, Shrigley, County Down illustration: based on a The Shrigley memorial by Albert Bridge. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2019-10-08. How this page was prepared.