County Tyrone Guide (Tír Eoghain)
“The Red Hand County” - in the province of Ulster. County town: Omagh.
The Sperrin Mountains and the Ulster American Folk Park.
Tyrone, the largest county in Northern Ireland, stretches from the shores of Lough Neagh up into the lonely Sperrin Mountains. It’s a county of strong farming and GAA tradition, and home to the Ulster American Folk Park, which tells the story of the millions who emigrated from Ulster to the New World.
Tyrone is the largest of Northern Ireland's six counties, a broad inland sweep of glens, bog and farmland rising to the Sperrin Mountains along its northern rim. Its name, Tir Eoghain, means the land of Eoghan, a son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, and for centuries it was the heartland of the O'Neills, the most powerful Gaelic dynasty in Ireland. Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, led the great Gaelic resistance of the Nine Years' War before sailing from Ireland in 1607 in the Flight of the Earls - the event that opened the door to the Plantation of Ulster and reshaped the province forever.
Few counties are as bound up with the story of emigration to America. The Ulster American Folk Park outside Omagh grew around the boyhood home of Thomas Mellon, founder of the Pittsburgh banking dynasty, and the ancestral homesteads of Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Woodrow Wilson still stand at Ballygawley and near Strabane. Strabane itself was a famous printing town whose apprentice John Dunlap went on to print the American Declaration of Independence. Today Tyrone is known for its engineering firms, its lively market towns, the Bronze Age mystery of the Beaghmore stone circles, and a fierce devotion to Gaelic football that has brought Sam Maguire home four times.
Cities, towns and villages in Tyrone
- Omagh - The county town at the meeting of the Drumragh and Camowen rivers, with the Ulster American Folk Park on its doorstep.
- Dungannon - The historic seat of the O'Neill chieftains, whose castle hill overlooks a town later built on linen and engineering.
- Strabane - A border town with a famous printing tradition - John Dunlap and James Wilson, grandfather of President Woodrow Wilson, both learned their trades here.
- Cookstown - A Plantation town famous for its main street, around two kilometres long and one of the longest in Ireland.
- Coalisland - A former coal-mining and canal town, and the home of 1985 world snooker champion Dennis Taylor.
- Castlederg - A west Tyrone market town on the River Derg whose castle ruins recall centuries of border warfare.
- Sion Mills - A picturesque model village built around a great linen spinning mill by the Herdman family in the 1830s.
- Clogher - A tiny cathedral town in a fertile valley, seat of one of the oldest bishoprics in Ireland.
- Benburb - A village above the Blackwater gorge, site of Owen Roe O'Neill's famous victory over a Covenanter army in 1646.
- Moy - An elegant village laid out in the 1760s by Lord Charlemont, reputedly on the plan of an Italian piazza, and once famed for its horse fairs.
Famous people from Tyrone
- Hugh O'Neill - Earl of Tyrone and last great Gaelic lord of Ireland, who led the Nine Years' War and departed in the Flight of the Earls in 1607.
- John Dunlap - Strabane-born printer who printed the first copies of the American Declaration of Independence and founded America's first successful daily newspaper.
- Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan) - The comic novelist behind At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman was born in Strabane in 1911.
- Brian Friel - One of Ireland's greatest playwrights, author of Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa, born near Omagh in 1929.
- Benedict Kiely - Novelist, broadcaster and seanchai of modern Irish letters, raised in Omagh, which colours much of his fiction.
- Jimmy Kennedy - Omagh-born songwriter whose hits included Teddy Bears' Picnic and Red Sails in the Sunset.
- Dennis Taylor - Coalisland-born snooker player who won the 1985 world championship on the final black in front of 18.5 million BBC viewers.
- Darren Clarke - Dungannon golfer who won the Open Championship in 2011 and starred in multiple Ryder Cups.
- Peter Canavan - Ballygawley Gaelic footballer regarded as one of the greatest ever, who captained Tyrone to their first All-Ireland title in 2003.
Did you know?
- Tyrone is the largest county in Northern Ireland, covering more than 3,200 square kilometres from Lough Neagh to the Donegal border.
- The Beaghmore stone circles near Cookstown, uncovered during turf cutting in the 1940s, comprise seven circles and dozens of cairns and alignments from the Bronze Age.
- John Dunlap of Strabane printed the Declaration of Independence on the night of 4 July 1776, and the surviving copies are known as Dunlap broadsides.
- The ancestral homes of two US presidents survive in Tyrone: Ulysses S. Grant's at Ballygawley and Woodrow Wilson's family homestead at Dergalt near Strabane.
- The Ulster American Folk Park at Omagh grew around the cottage where Thomas Mellon, founder of the Mellon banking dynasty of Pittsburgh, was born in 1813.
- The name Tyrone comes from Tir Eoghain, the land of Eoghan, a son of the legendary fifth-century king Niall of the Nine Hostages.
- Tyrone have won the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship four times, in 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2021.
- Cookstown was laid out with a main street around two kilometres long, often cited as the longest in Ireland, earning it the nickname the Long Line.
Surnames from Tyrone: O'Neill · Quinn · Donnelly · McGrath · Devlin · Bradley · Campbell · Devine · Gormley · Henry · Lafferty · Loughran