The Moorlough Shore" is a traditional Irish ballad, which first appears in print in an 1886 broadside, now at the Bodleian Library. Over the years there has been much debate about where the song is set, but it is clear that it must be in County Tyrone, close to Strabane. There are a number of places referred to in the lyrics that link it to Holyhill (usually pronounced Holly Hill), a Sinclair estate in the parish of Leckpatrick, where there is also a Moorlough Road. The Sinclairs established themselves in Tyrone and Donegal in the seventeenth century, and by the 1770s had set up a thriving linen business at Holyhill. In 1778, Mrs Elizabeth Sinclair asked permission from the landowner to divert the course of the Glenmornan River (a tributary of the Foyle) to provide water for a flax mill or a bleaching green.

Bleaching and drying both used to be mainly outdoor activities, and they were closely related. The stretch of grass set aside for these jobs was called a bleaching-green or drying-ground. Whether you were spreading off-white linen on the ground to bleach in the sun, or just putting your laundry there to dry, or if you were hanging it on a breezy line, you wanted a:

"grassy corner well open to the sun,...sheltered from high winds...the attentions of wandering poultry... and the incursions of pigs, puppies and calves...they not only soil the clothes, but will tear and even eat them"
Katherine Purdon, Laundry at Home, 1902, quoted by Pamela Sambrook in The Country House Servant


Farewell to Sinclair's castle ground [grand].
Farewell to Holly Hill.
Where the linen webs lie bleaching green
And the bawdeen [falling, purling] stream runs still.
Near there I spent my youthful days,
But alas they are no more,
For cruelty has banished me,
Far away from the Moorlough Shore.




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