Holywood was an important Anglo-Norman settlement. Scots settlers developed the town and restored the church (the Priory) as a place of worship.
It is possible that Holywood’s famous maypole in fact originated as a typical Scottish market cross, as shown in miniature on Thomas Raven’s map of c. 1625. Holywood is laid out as a neat town of 51 houses, built around the maypole/marketcross, with a stream separating the town from the Priory.
In the early 1600s the Priory became the place of burial for Scottish families that had settled in the area. Several of the Hamiltons, kinsmen of Sir James Hamilton, were interred here, including his younger brother William who was ‘creditably buried, and with great lamentation’ in the 1620s. In 1615, Robert Cunningham became minister of
Holywood,only the second Presbyterian minister in Ireland. In 1644 the Solemn
League and Covenant was signed by the local Ulster-Scots population – a copy of it is on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
In the 1870s, Rev Henry Henderson, minister of Holywood Presbyterian Church, authored a newspaper column under the name‘Ulster-Scot’. A later
minister was Rev J.B. Woodburn, author of the important 1914 book The Ulster
Scot - His History and Religion.
Lorne House overlooking Belfast Lough, is now home to the Girl Guide Association of Ireland. It was built by Henry Campbell, a wealthy industrialist, in the Scottish baronial style in 1875 and named after the hereditary home of the Campbells in Scotland.
