It started with a king's signature
On 16 December 1756, King George II of Great Britain put his name to a charter granting the Earl of Donegall the right to hold two fairs a year on the town and lands of Ballyclare. The annual rent set by the crown was 13 shillings and 4 pence, "to be paid forever". That phrase still sits in the original document, kept today by the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast.
The fairs were practical events, not festivals. Farmers, merchants and travellers came together to buy and sell animals, foodstuffs, cloth, and small manufactured goods. A market town in the eighteenth century could rise or fall on the strength of its fairs, and Ballyclare was building a reputation that would last well beyond its founders' lifetimes.
The charter granted two fair days a year. Within a few generations the calendar had grown to four. Two of those, the spring fair in May and the autumn fair in November, became the most important. Both fell at the start of a hiring period, when farm workers were taken on for six-month terms, and the fairs swelled with people who needed to settle wages, take on labour, or look for work themselves.
The May Fair of 1756, held to mark that first year of charter, is the moment we count from. Every year since, with rare interruption, the town has gathered for the same fair on something like the same week.
"to be paid forever"
From the 1756 charter, on the annual rent of 13 shillings and 4 pence
Two fairs a year that ran rural Antrim
The May Fair was never just a market. In rural Antrim, life on the land turned around two days in the calendar, the May Fair and the November Fair, and the rhythm of the working year followed them.
These were hiring fairs as much as trading fairs. Farm servants and labourers gathered on the day to be taken on for the next six months. Servant girls came too, looking for work in farmhouses or in the bigger houses around the district. Wages were settled at the fair, contracts were sealed with a handshake and a small token payment called the earnest, and on the strength of that, a worker's next half-year was decided.
It was not, by modern standards, a comfortable system. Workers stood in lines while farmers walked along inspecting them. Local memory has it that some farmers checked workers' teeth the same way they checked horses, and you sometimes still hear that detail told as a reminder of how raw the experience could be. For the lucky and the strong, a hiring meant a season's certainty. For the older or the unwell, it could mean a long walk home with no work in sight.
For all of that, the fair was also the day everyone came into town. Wages were earned there, courtships started there, news travelled, scores were settled, and stories were brought back home that lasted the family the rest of the year. It was, by some distance, the biggest day in the local calendar.
When cavalry regiments from across Europe came to buy
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the May Fair had become known for one thing above all others: horses.
Through the 1800s, horse trading came to dominate the spring fair. Sellers rode into Ballyclare bareback in the early hours, leading strings of horses behind them by long ropes, often half a dozen at a time. Main Street and the Square would fill with animals, dealers, farmers, and onlookers. By breakfast, deals were already being struck.
The buyers came from a remarkable spread of places. Local farmers needed plough horses for the heavy soil of mid-Antrim. The Belfast carriage trade came up looking for matched pairs and good driving stock. Dealers from across Ireland and Britain travelled in, knowing the quality at Ballyclare was reliable. One Belfast dealer is said to have bought 100 horses at the fair every year, year after year.
The most striking buyers, though, were the military. Representatives of cavalry regiments from across Europe came to buy at Ballyclare as the fair's reputation spread. Tradition holds the May Fair was, during the Napoleonic Wars, among the largest horse trading events in Europe, with mounts shipped out for cavalry on both sides of the Channel. That is a claim from oral history rather than a documented fact, but it has been carried down for so long that it has become part of how the town remembers itself.
By the late nineteenth century, demand had grown so heavy that the Monday before May Fair Day was given over entirely to horse sales. The fair filled two days at its peak, the Monday taken up with horses and the Tuesday with the wider event. For a generation, that was probably the busiest commercial week of the year in the town.
"Representatives of cavalry regiments from across Europe came to buy."
On the May Fair's nineteenth century horse trade
From Ballyclare to America
The story of Ballyclare and America begins long before the May Fair did.
When the Plantation of Ulster brought Lowland Scots into the north of Ireland in the early 1600s, many of them settled in the Six Mile Water valley, the green strip of farmland that runs through what is now Ballyclare and the parishes around it. Within a few generations, those Scots had become Ulster-Scots, sometimes called Scots-Irish, with a culture and a way of speaking distinct from the rest of Ireland. They worked the land, built Presbyterian meeting houses, and held tightly to their kin.
When the eighteenth century brought drought, rent rises, and the pull of cheap land across the Atlantic, many of those same Ulster-Scots families left for America. The exodus through the 1700s was enormous. Whole communities boarded ships at Belfast, Larne, and Derry and started again in Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Virginia, and the new lands beyond the Appalachians. Their stamp on the early American republic is one of the great untold stories of Atlantic history.
Three of the most striking American figures of the period had family ties to Ballyclare and the country around it. Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, one of the great writers of the United States, came from Ulster-Scots stock with roots in the area. Sam Houston, first and third President of the Republic of Texas and the man whose name the city carries, descended from the same emigration. So did General Alexander Macomb, who served as commanding general of the United States Army from 1828 to 1841. Even Jonathan Swift, the satirist who gave the world Gulliver's Travels, is recorded in town tradition as having preached in Ballyclare.
The 270th anniversary of the May Fair in 2026 falls in the same year that the United States marks 250 years of independence. The 2026 theme, USA 250, is the town's way of acknowledging the people who left here for there, and the country they helped shape. It is a moment to look up from the local and remember that, for a small town, Ballyclare's reach has been long.
The First World War and the rise of the engine
The horse fair's great years did not last.
The First World War brought the era to a hard close. With the conflict came mass mechanisation, and the trade that had built the fair's reputation began to unwind. Cavalry regiments were disbanded or motorised. Tanks and lorries took the place of the horses that had once been Ballyclare's bread and butter, and the agricultural world followed soon after, as tractors began to replace plough horses on farms across Antrim.
The May Fair did not stop, but it shrank. The buyers from Belfast and beyond came less often and bought fewer animals. The dealers who had crowded Main Street thinned out. Through the interwar years the fair was still kept up, but it had become a more local affair, a gathering for the surrounding country rather than a continental marketplace.
For a town built around a single great fair, that was no small loss. By the second half of the 1930s, much of the old commercial life of the May Fair had quietly faded, and the town began to look for what it might become next.
A committee of locals brings the fair back to life
The answer came in 1948.
A small committee of local people, conscious that something close to a tradition had been allowed to slip, came together to revive the May Fair. The first revived fair the following year was a modest affair compared to the busy weeks of the nineteenth century, but it had something the old fair never had. In 1949 the first amusements arrived, and the dodgems, still part of the fair to this day, took up a place on the green and never really left.
Over the next decade the revival caught fire. The Mayor's Parade became the official opening of the week, with floats, pipe bands, and decorated lorries running the length of the town. Fancy dress parades drew streams of children and parents into Main Street. Pipe band contests pulled players from across Ulster. The May Fair, which had been a market and a hiring day in its first life, came back as a community festival.
By the late 1950s, local newspapers were reporting twenty thousand people through the town in a single fair week. All approach roads to Ballyclare were lined with cars as far as the eye could see, the kind of attendance that left the surrounding villages all but emptied for the day. Through it all, the traditional horse fair on May Fair Day kept going, a thread back to the town's original charter, even as the wider event around it became something new.
"All approach roads to Ballyclare were lined with cars as far as the eye could see."
On the post-war revival of the May Fair
Suspended, then resumed
The Troubles cast a long shadow over the late twentieth century, and the May Fair was not spared. For several years through the worst of the 1970s the fair was suspended, judged unsafe to run as Northern Ireland came under the strain of conflict. Plenty of community events across the country went the same way in those years, and Ballyclare was no exception.
When it returned, it was not for the last time. The fair came back through the 1980s and 1990s, then on through the early 2000s, drawing on the same template the 1948 revivers had laid down. The 250th anniversary in 2006 was marked properly, and the fair held its place as a fixed point in the town's identity even as Ballyclare itself was changing fast around it.
The most recent interruption came in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of nearly every public gathering across these islands. The May Fair was paused, then returned the following year, the only modern stop other than the Troubles. Each return has tended to confirm something the town already knew: this is the week the place comes back to itself.
Celebrating 270 years in 2026
In 2026, the Ballyclare May Fair turns 270.
The week runs 16 to 23 May, the same calendar slot the original charter intended, with a programme spanning music, food, sport, family entertainment, and the traditional horse fair. The closing weekend brings the All-American Party in the Park, anchored to the 2026 theme of USA 250, the town's nod to the Ulster-Scots families who left for America two and three centuries ago.
The week is sponsored by Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council and the Ulster-Scots Agency, with support from Reid Black Solicitors and Dennison Commercials, and a long list of local volunteers and committees who keep the wheels turning. Plenty of the old elements remain. The Mayor's Parade still opens the week. The horse fair still gathers on its traditional day. The fireworks finale still draws the crowd back into town for the closing Saturday.
This site is a community resource for the milestone year, built and donated locally. For full event listings, times and locations, see the programme.