The most frequently cited source for the story of the rebel heroine is Wesley Guard Lyttle’s Betsy Gray or Hearts of Down: a Tale of Ninety-Eight which appeared in 1888 and was last reprinted in 2008.

[1] It includes the "Ballad of Betsy Gray" commemorating "the pride of Down" who, following her appearance amidst the "gory fray" at Ballynahinch, is cut down (with "freedom's dreams") alongside "her sweetheart, Willie Boal" and her brother by government "Yeos" (Yeomanry).

M'Comb's Guide to Belfast... and Adjoining Districts published in 1861 draws on McSimin's sketches of the rebellion (1849)[4] and on a New and Popular History of Ireland (1857) to render a broadly comparable account.

[5] According to Lyttle, Betsy, the daughter of Hans Gray, a Presbyterian farmer, goes into battle "with a brother and lover, determined to share their fate, mounted on a pony, and bearing a green flag".

While loyalists made "Bessie" the subject of "rude ballads", in "many a cottage" there was to be seen hanging "a rough map representing the battle scene with our heroine mounted on a pony and bearing a green flag".

[7] M'Comb's also reproduces a poem commemorating the loss of the "poor maiden" on "Erin's ruined plain" by a Miss Balfour published just twelve years after the battle in 1810.

[5] Richard Robert Madden, another early historian of the United Irishmen, had a description from Mary Ann McCracken of the County Down heroine at Ballynahinch riding a white pony and "carrying a stand of colours".

In an appendix to a reprint of Lyttle’s ‘Hearts of Down’ in 1968 historian Aiken McClelland of the Ulster Folk Museum sets out evidence for the Townland of Tullyniskey (now spelt Tullinisky) near the villages of Waringsford and Dromara in County Down as an alternative birthplace for Betsy Gray.

[16] According to this evidence and the local tradition of the area, Betsy was the daughter of a John and Rebecca Gray (née Young) of Tullyniskey with records for near-by Garvaghy Parish Church showing her baptised on 14 January 1780.

He replied that “any man, no matter what his politics might be, who could not honour such heroism and unsullied patriotism as that displayed by the victims who fell and were buried on his farm would be dead to all sense of humanity and nobility”.

Following Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill in 1886, as unionists they resisted the efforts of largely Catholic-supported nationalists to invoke the memory of "'98" in support of their campaign to restore Ireland's legislative independence.

[11] When the parties, mainly from Belfast, began to arrive in horse-drawn carriages for the centenary ceremony scuffles took place, the reins of the horses were cut by the locals, and the visitors put to flight.