Our Story

Dunadry… the name means The Middle Fort (Dun-Eddery) and it was so called because of its position as the middle one of three forts on the road which ran from Tara to Dunseverick.

This pad was well used in the legendary days by the Red Branch Knights of Ulster and one of the most valiant of them, Conal Cernach, lived at Dunseverick.

In more recent days, perhaps around the sixteen hundreds, a paper mill was founded here by one Daniel Blow.

The Blows were said to be court printers to William III and to have printed the court circulars at the time of the Battle of the Boyne. The mill, on the river at Dunadry, continued making paper and to be known as Blow’s Mill until the turn of the 19th century. Linen manufacture, in all its various stages then started and processes from scutching to bleaching continued at Dunadry until the nineteen twenties. By this time the village, housing some seventy/eighty people, had grown up around the Mill on the banks of the river and the setting was typical of this particular kind of Ulster linen centre, with its mill, powered by the river, its village to house the workers and its bleaching green and later its own railway station.

When the original owners bought the village and old mill in nineteen hundred and fifty-seven there were still twenty houses all occupied but the mill and the station were closed and derelict.

The Dunadry Hotel now covers the site of the village and the buildings have been planned to take advantage of the Southern aspect and look over the garden down to the mill-race and river. The river, The Six Mile Water, or as it used to be called in the Irish, The Owenavue (River of the Rushes) is a good trout river and it also enjoys a late season run of Dollaghan (Lough Neagh salmon).

The present owners, The Mooney family, purchased the hotel in 1986 and have striven to keep  its unique character intact whilst introducing the modern elements you would expect from a four star hotel.