of the loch behind Mr. Savage's are bold ground, abounding with numerous pleasing landscapes; the opposite coast, consisting of the woods and improvements of Castle Ward, is a fine scenery.
Called at Lord Bangor's, at Castle Ward, to deliver a letter of recommendations but unfortunately he was on a sailing party to England; walked through the woods, etc. The house was built by the present lord. It is a very handsome edifice, with two principal fronts, but not of the same architecture, for the one is Gothic and the other Grecian. From the temple is a fine wooded scene: you look down on a glen of wood, with a winding hill quite covered with it, and which breaks the view of a large bay. Over it appears the peninsula of Strangford, which consists of enclosures and wood. To the right the bay is bounded by a fine grove, which projects into it. A ship at anchor added much. The house well situated above several rising woods; the whole scene a fine one. I remarked in Lord Bangor's domains a fine field of turnips, but unhoed. There were some cabbages also.
Belfast is a very well built town of brick, they having no stone quarry in the neighbourhood. The streets are broad and straight, and the inhabitants, amounting to about fifteen thousand, make it appear lively and busy. The public buildings are not numerous nor very striking, but over the exchange Lord Donegal is building an assembly room, sixty feet long by thirty broad, and twenty-four high; a very elegant room. A card-room adjoining, thirty by twenty-two, and twenty-two high; a tea-room of the same size. His lordship is also building a new church, which is one of the lightest and most pleasing I have anywhere seen: it is seventy-four by fifty-four, and thirty high to the cornice, the aisles separated by a double row of columns; nothing can be lighter or more pleasing. The town belongs entirely to his lordship. Rent of it 2,000 pounds a year. His estate extends from Drumbridge, near Lisburn, to Larne, twenty miles in a right line, and is ten broad. His royalties are great, containing the whole of Loch Neagh, which is, I suppose, the greatest of any subject in Europe. His eel fishery at Tome, and Port New, on the river Ban, lets for 500 pounds a year; and all the fisheries are his to the leap at Coleraine. The estate is supposed to be 31,000 pounds a year, the greatest at present in Ireland. Inishowen, in Donegal, is his, and is 11,000 pounds of it. In Antrim, Lord Antrim's is the most extensive property, being four baronies, and one hundred and seventy-three thousand acres. The rent 8,000 pounds a year, but re-let for 64,000 pounds a year, by tenants that have perpetuities, perhaps the cruellest instance in the world of carelessness for the interests of posterity. The present lord's father granted those leases.
I was informed that Mr. Isaac, near Belfast, had four acres, Irish measure, of strong clay land not broken up for many years, which being amply manured with lime rubbish and sea shells, and fallowed, was sown with wheat, and yielded 87 pounds 9s. at 9s. to 12s. per cwt. Also that Mr. Whitley, of Ballinderry, near Lisburn, a tenant of Lord Hertford's, has rarely any wheat that does not yield him 18 pounds an acre. The tillage of the neighbourhood for ten miles round is doubled in a few years. Shall export one thousand tons of corn this year from Belfast, most of it to the West Indies, particularly oats.