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Ballybeen is a townland located east of Dundonald village, with its name deriving from the Irish "Baile Bín" (Town of the peak).

It was a rural area on the main road from Belfast to Newtownards, dominated by Ballybeen House - which belonged to the Robb family. The house and surrounding farmland were cleared for the construction of the Ballybeen housing estate in the 1960s.

As was the case in many new estates at the time, there was a mixture of Protestant and Roman Catholic families - however as The Troubles progressed through the '70s, the estate became almost exclusively Protestant with some loyalist elements within it.