[5] In 540 AD, St. Finian founded Movilla Abbey, a monastery, on a hill overlooking Strangford Lough about a mile northeast of present-day Newtownards town centre.

It was sacked by the Vikings sometime after AD 824, though survived for a thousand years as a monastic settlement (becoming part of the Augustinian Order in 1135), until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1542.

[11] In 1605 (prior to the official Plantation of Ulster in 1610), Hugh Montgomery was granted the lands and set about rebuilding what was by then known as Newtown, later expanded to Newtownards.

Scottish Protestant settlers, particularly from Ayr, and to a lesser extent Irvine, in Ayrshire, arrived in large numbers and the town grew quickly.

[12] Due to the shallow mud of Strangford Lough, Newtown never developed as a port, with goods instead transported from the nearby town of Donaghadee on the Irish Sea coast of the Ards Peninsula.

On the morning of 9 June, "Pike Sunday", United Irishmen, mainly from Bangor, Donaghadee, Greyabbey and Ballywalter, under the command of the Presbyterian licentiate (later American diplomat) David Bailie Warden, marched on the town.

They were driven off with musket fire from the Market House, but the garrison, consisting of troops from the York Fencible Regiment of Foot subsequently withdrew, allowing the rebels to establish a French revolutionary-style Committee of Public Safety.

[14] During the Great Famine, which resulted from the dependence of small tenants and cottiers on a blighted potato crop, the largest local landowner, Lord Londonderry, rejected rent reductions on grounds of "personal inconvenience".

By 1847 the 800 inhabitants of the town were witness to "emaciated and half-famished souls" queuing at soup kitchens and overflowing the newly built workhouse.

In general, conditions on the land, not as acutely subdivided as in western districts of Ireland, and the availability of weaving and other employments, saved the town from the worst.

[20] On 1 November 2021, a bus in the town was hijacked and set on fire by two masked assailants allegedly protesting the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Situated adjacent to the Clandeboye Estate outside Newtownards, the centre is a unique visitor attraction of international significance showing the reality of the Great War and its effects on the community at home.

[26] On the east shore of Strangford Lough, a few miles outside Newtownards and near Greyabbey, stands Mount Stewart, an 18th-century house and garden – the home of the Londonderry family.

At the time it was Northern Ireland's premier sporting event, regularly attracting crowds in excess of a quarter of a million people.