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The Ha' is a seventeenth-century house located in Down, Northern Ireland, and is protected as a monument of historic importance by the Historic Environment Division under reference 7569. Built during the post-medieval period, the house represents domestic architecture from an era of significant change in Ulster, when English and Scottish settlers established farmsteads across the province. The name "ha'" or "haw" reflects the vernacular speech of the period, common in the north of Ireland where Scottish and Northern English influences shaped both language and building traditions.
The house occupies a site underlain by the Gala Group, a formation of wacke deposited during the Telychian stage of the Silurian period, some 430 million years ago. This hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock provided a stable foundation and would have supplied suitable stone for local building. The landscape of Down, shaped by glacial activity and these ancient geological substrates, offered mixed farming opportunities that would have sustained a seventeenth-century household.
The Ha' survives as evidence of post-medieval settlement patterns in Ulster, reflecting the domestic life and building practices of the early modern period. Such houses are increasingly rare, making this example valuable for understanding how ordinary householders lived during a transformative time in Irish history, when new agricultural and social structures were being established across the region.
The ha', the haw. c17th house is a scheduled monument protected by Department for Communities NI under reference 7569. View the official record →
The Ha' is a seventeenth-century house located in Down, Northern Ireland, and is protected as a monument of historic importance by the Historic Environment Division under reference 7569.
The ha', the haw. c17th house dates from the post-med period, and is classified as a house. It is one of over 32,000 scheduled monuments protected across the UK.
The ha', the haw. c17th house is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, legally protected by DfC Northern Ireland (NISMR) — the body responsible for designating and safeguarding heritage sites in Ni. The official designation reference is 7569.
Several scheduled monuments lie within 10 km, including Rath (5.8 km), Raised rath (6.5 km), The temple, templemoyle. church & graveyard (6.9 km).
This page is just one thread. A full Aubrey report pulls together 14 strands of The ha', the haw. c17th house's history, each drawn from the record and mapped to the exact spot:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
The ha', the haw. c17th house stands on Gala Group, bedrock that formed in the Telychian. The rock here is wacke.