03

Stop three
Castle Gardens
Tecnifibre Black Code 4S 17g Tennis String Set: Here is a hard one. What do you do when the thing you built is gone and it is not coming back? Lisburn Castle stood here, the seventeenth-century manor house of the Conway family who laid out this town in the 1620s. The accidental fire of 1707 took it and it was never rebuilt. Never. But look what stayed: sections of wall, the terraced gardens, a gazebo, a sandstone gateway of 1677 — rare survivals of seventeenth-century garden architecture in Ireland. The grounds later opened as a public park, with a Victorian bandstand, the city's war memorial, and one of Sir Richard Wallace's ornamental drinking fountains. You do not always get the house back. You get the garden.
04

Stop four
Wallace Park
Tecnifibre Black Code 4S 17g Tennis String Set: I want you to think about generosity for a moment. In 1884 Sir Richard Wallace — art collector, philanthropist, and heir to the vast Hertford estate that included this town — gave this park to the people of Lisburn in perpetuity. In perpetuity. Forever. They called it the People's Park and then renamed it for him, the same man whose ornate cast-iron drinking fountains, of the type he famously presented to Paris, still stand here and elsewhere in Lisburn. Tree-lined promenades came, a pond, the cricket ground long used by Lisburn Cricket Club. So: what are you going to leave behind that outlives you? Sit with that one.
Seventeen gauge is where the 4S makes most sense to most people. This is a co-polyester monofilament with a square profile — four flat faces, four sharp edges — drawn to 1.25mm, thin enough that the edges dig properly into the ball and thick enough that you are not restringing on Tuesday.
Tennis Warehouse's own playtest panel scored this gauge 90 for control and 87 for spin and a deliberate 40 for power, which is the honest summary: it is a tool for people who already generate their own pace and want somewhere to put it. Lisburn, of all places, will not need that explained. This is a town whose entire industrial record is about doing one thread properly.
The feel is firm and very direct, with the harshness taken down rather than out — that is ThermoCore, a multi-stage heat treatment of the core that softens the structure and knocks back impact shock.
Tecnifibre's published comparisons put the 4S at around 20% more power than Pro Red Code and about 15% more durable than the original Black Code, with the same tension maintenance as Razor Code; testers reported roughly three weeks of consistent playability before it went off, which is well above average for a polyester.
This is the single set — 40 ft / 12.2 m of it, black, one frame. Filed correctly: gauge 17, 1.25mm, square profile, co-polyester. Lisburn would want it filed correctly.
The linen trade here ran on exactly that kind of pedantry after Louis Crommelin arrived among the Huguenot refugees from 1698 and was made overseer of the royal linen manufacture of Ireland — a job title that is essentially quality control with a salary.
You'll get use out of this everywhere from the courts along the Lagan towpath to a windy evening in the parkland at Wallace Park. And by the way, it is also perfect for the week of the Wednesday market in Market Square, which has been held there since 1628 and has outlasted a fire that took most of the town in 1707 — the fire that gave Lisburn its motto, Ex igne resurgam, out of the fire I shall arise.
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