The story of Sentry Hill
The McKinneys traced their arrival to a Scottish ancestor who came to Ireland in the early 1700s, with family tradition linking the move to the upheaval around the 1715 Jacobite rising. They settled to farm the high ground above what is now Glengormley, and built the present house in 1835, modernising it in the 1880s.
The figure who made Sentry Hill what it is was William Fee McKinney, born in 1832. A prosperous farmer and secretary of Carnmoney Presbyterian Church for 62 years, he was a relentless recorder of everyday life. He kept diaries and letters, took around a thousand photographs on a glass-plate camera, and gathered books, fossils, rock samples and arrowheads. He married Eliza McGaw in 1861 and they had eight children.
The next generations carried the same marks of their time. Tom McKinney trained in agriculture and introduced new farming methods around 1912, then served in the First World War and died of shrapnel wounds in July 1916. His sister Meg never married and stayed at Sentry Hill until her death in 1964 at the age of 96. The property later passed through the family to Dr Joe Dundee, who inherited in 1941.
Because the family kept everything and the line stayed in the house until 1996, the contents survived almost intact. Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council now owns the house and around 23 acres, and opened it as a museum and visitor centre, where the McKinneys' own belongings still furnish the rooms they lived in.