Scrabo Hill, the high ground above Newtownards, has a great sepulchral cairn on it. A note in an old collection of Irish songs says that under this hill and cairn the fairy king Macananty or Macanantan had his palace, and the place still kept much of its fairy reputation among the people of the district. His name, the note adds, was familiar especially among the people of the mountain districts from Dundalk to Newcastle in County Down. It is the belief the ballad John Macananty's Courtship embodies, that the fairies often take mortals away to their palaces in forts and green hills.
George Francis Savage-Armstrong included a dialect poem, Macananty: Fairy King of Scrabo Hill, in his Ballads of Down (1901). Some folklorists discussing the figure online stress that Victorian poems about Irish fairies were often literary inventions, so how much of the detail is old oral tradition is uncertain.
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