About the village and the canal
The Newry Canal is older than it looks and more important than it seems. It was built in the eighteenth century to move coal from the Tyrone coalfield down to Newry and out to sea, and it is generally credited as the first summit-level canal in these islands — a canal that climbs to a high point and then descends again, which is a much harder piece of engineering than a level cut. Everything that came after in British and Irish canal building learned something from it.
Scarva grew up on that line. The basin, the lock chambers and the terrace of houses along the water are all the canal's doing, and the wide village street is the shape a trading village takes when the trade arrives by boat.
The canal carried lighters until the trade drained away to the railways and then the roads, and it closed. What was left was the towpath — a flat, well-made, twenty-mile line through some of the quietest country in Down and Armagh — and eventually somebody had the sense to surface it and open it to walkers and cyclists rather than let it disappear into scrub.
There are other layers along the way if you look. Concrete pillboxes sit half-buried in the vegetation beside the water, put there in the 1940s when the canal line was treated as a defensive feature. And once a year the village fills entirely, on 13 July, for the Sham Fight in Scarva Demesne — a costumed re-enactment of the Boyne that is one of the longest-running set-piece days in the country.
The rest of the time it is a duck pond, a play park, some carved wooden animals, a good tray bake in season, and twenty flat miles of water to walk beside. That is not a bad village.