Eleventh Night
Ulster Protestant celebration in Northern Ireland
In Northern Ireland, the Eleventh Night or 11th Night, also known as "bonfire night", is the night before the Twelfth of July, an Ulster Protestant celebration. On this night, towering bonfires are lit in Protestant loyalist neighbourhoods, and are often accompanied by street parties and loyalist marching bands. The bonfires are mostly made of wooden pallets and locally collected wood. They originally celebrated the Williamite conquest of the 1690s, which began the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and has been maintained by the Protestant community. Some are controlled by loyalist paramilitaries, and authorities may be wary of taking action against controversial bonfires. In 2021, there were about 250 Eleventh Night bonfires.
Origins and overview
Like The Twelfth, the Eleventh Night bonfires celebrate the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the victory of Protestant king William of Orange over the Catholic James II during the Williamite-Jacobite War (1689–1691), which began the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. When King William landed at Carrickfergus in 1690, his supporters across Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, lit bonfires to celebrate. Some of those who did not join in the celebrations were attacked by the Williamites. There is also a belief that the bonfires commemorate the lighting of fires on the hills of counties Antrim and Down to help Williamite ships navigate through Belfast Lough at night.
The public source identifies “Eleventh Night” as ulster Protestant celebration in Northern Ireland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Eleventh, Night and Ulster.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eleventh Night” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.