Ballymoney (Irish: Baile Monaidhⓘ [ˌbˠalʲə ˈmˠɔnˠə], meaning 'townland of the moor')[3] is a town and civil parish in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

[8] In 1556, an account of an English expedition against the MacDonnells, a sept of the Scottish Clan Donald that lorded over a wide expanse of north and east Antrim known as the Route and Glynns, records "a bishop's house, which was with a castle and a church joined together in one, called Ballymonyn".

[9] Destroyed in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, no vestige of the bishop's house or castle remains, but a tower of a church built in 1637 by Sir Randall MacDonnell survives and is the town's oldest structure.

[11] Unlike the MacDonnells and the native Irish, the majority of these were not Roman Catholics, but neither did they recognise the episcopacy of the reformed church established under the British Crown.

[12] In summer 1718, people from Ballymoney and the surrounding area waved goodbye to five ships carrying Presbyterian ministers and their congregations across the Atlantic to start new lives in New England.

[13] From 1778, inspired by the revolt of their kinsmen in the America colonies, the disaffection among the people of the town and district took a more radical turn, first in the drilling and political conventions of the Volunteer militia, and then from 1795 in the Society of United Irishmen.

The "test" or pledge of the Society "to form a Brotherhood of affection amongst Irishmen of every religious persuasion" so as to secure an "equal representation of all the people in Ireland",[14] was administered by leading residents of the town, among them a doctor, a schoolmaster and two attorneys.

[15] When in June 1798, having despaired of parliamentary reform, the Society called for insurrection, men assembled on Dungobery Hill, parading with guns, pikes, pitchforks and scythes tied upon sticks.

[16] The young licentiate minister, Richard Caldwell, who had had command of the rebels found exile in the United States, there to die in War of 1812 in a march on Canada.

[20] In the decades following the famine, the issue of tenant right challenged large landowners who as "loyalists" and "unionists" believed they might count on the popular vote.

[21] After the turn of the century there was local support for the Independent Orange Order, promoted by its first Imperial Grand Master, Lindsay Crawford (an admirer of the United Irishmen), as an expression of "progressive Protestantism".

A meeting in Ballymoney Town Hall in October 1913 organised by Armour and Ballymena's Jack White, and with Sir Roger Casement and Alice Stopford Green on the platform, disputed the claim of Edward Carson's Unionists to speak for northern Protestants.

The most notorious incident occurred at the height of the Drumcree protests, three months after the 1998 "Good Friday" Agreement under which both republican and loyalist paramilitaries committed to permanent ceasefires.

The Ulster Volunteer Force petrol bombed a house in a predominantly Protestant area of the town killing three Catholic children, the Quinn brothers.