Castleboy Old Church, Portaferry Road, Castleboy, Cloghy, Newtownards, Co. Down, BT22 1HP

Castleboy Old Church

Grass-covered foundations of a former medieval church, located in the middle of a field approximately 90 metres north of the ruins of Castleboy, with odd pieces of rubble scattered across the site but no substantial sections of wall visible above ground.

The rectangular church measures roughly 21 metres by 8 metres. According to historical records, it was built by Hugh de Lacy in the late twelfth century, possibly around 1189, and is probably the hospital land mentioned in a pipe roll of around 1200 as 'terram hospitalariorum in Arte' (hospital land in the Ards). The church was associated with the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, now known as the Knights of Malta, a military and religious order originally instituted to protect Christians in the Holy Land and other pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem. The small parish itself became known as both Castleboy and Johnstown, owing to this connection with the Order.

Bishop Reeves, in his Ecclesiastical antiquities of Down Connor and Dromore (1847), described the church as having triple lancet windows on the east, a single lancet on the west, and a door with lancet windows on the north and south sides. According to the Archaeological Survey of County Down (1966), these architectural features suggest a building of the thirteenth century rather than the late twelfth century.

The nearby tower house of Castleboy, known as 'the yellow castle', was possibly constructed during the fifteenth century. By 1584, 'the preceptory of the Arde, with the Manor of Johnstone' were leased to George Alexander. A patent roll of 1603 describes the estate of 'the late monastery of St. John of Jerusalem', indicating that the Order had by that stage become a victim of the Reformation. The building was already in ruins when visited by Walter Harris in 1744, and by the 1830s, when the Ordnance Survey Memoirs were compiled, very little of the fabric could be seen.