The Silent Valley Dam Lyrics

Up near Moolieve Mountain, where the winds blow wild and free

Where the Kilkeel River makes its way down to the sea

The misty Mourne Mountains there they tower as they stand

Watching the still waters of the Silent Valley Dam

The sound of children's voices it once made the valley ring

The foxes on the mountain howled and the birds they loved to sing

They called it Happy Valley in the days before the dam

Before the hand of man it came to alter natures' plan

The last to leave was Jimmy Shiels and he got little thanks

To those who knew and loved him he was Jimmy of the Banks

The friendships and the solitude, the heather and the turf

This was Jimmy's kingdom, it was heaven here on earth

But in the name of progress surely something always dies

And now the Happy Valley far beneath the water lies

So raise your glass to times gone past and listen while you can

And I'll tell you all the story of the Silent Valley Dam

Way up in Belfast city you could hear the hue and cry

With the houses, mills and factories the town was running dry

So they came in search of water to the hills of County Down

They found what they were looking for and called it Watertown

The call went out for men who wouldn't shirk when life was rough

The kind of man that you could trust when the going it got tough

They came across the mountain tracks they'd known since they were born

The men who'd built the Back Ditch, the Iron Men of Mourne

Then Carson cut the first sod in his fancy city shoes

And someone said, get digging boys, there's lots of work to do

The birds they stopped their singing and all around the glen

Was the noise and the dust and the engine thrust of the steam navvy men

While Rudolph Valentino flickered on the silent screen

Round the clock, work never stopped by man or by machine

Legends grew and stories flew in the streets and in the bars

And the Silent Valley men became the heroes and the stars

There was Mad Harry Lovatt, the Silent Valley boss

He'd sack you soon as look at you if something made him cross

Sam Breeze and Dan Dooley in his Ruston No. ten

Flattened Fox's Knowe and Walker's Height to level out the glen

A constable called Lawless kept the peace despite his name

And the mighty Longstone Blarger kept the men all on their game

Jim and Willie Newell loved the music and it flowed

On the fiddle and melodeon they'd play The Mountain Road

Now every inch of progress it was won with sweat and blood

Digging for rock bottom in the days before the flood

And the men down in the trenches often got by on a prayer

Two hundred feet below the ground in the mud and the compressed air

The engineers, the navvies, the railmen, and the boss

They all pulled together boys to get the wall across

And when the dam was finished in the year of thirty-three

The water flowed to Belfast town and the homes of you and me

As always there's a price to pay when man with nature strives

And the Valley took eight mothers' sons who paid it with their lives

The wall they built from Moolieve across to Slievenaglogh

Is their monument forever in the solid mountain rock

For the part they played and the mark they made with the shifts that they put in

Sam Cooke and Johnny Murphy, Mick Sinnett and Hugh Quin

John Cousins, William Forsyth, George Phillips, Jimmy Bains

History will remember them, the story's in their names