County Derry
Doire
- IrishDoire
- ProvinceUlster
- County townColeraine, historically, from 1899
- Local governmentNo county council since 1973. The county lies in three districts: Causeway Coast and Glens; Mid Ulster; Derry City and Strabane
- Area2,118 km²
- Population252,231 (2021)
- Highest pointSawel, 678 m, shared with Tyrone
The siege
Thirteen apprentices shut the city gates against King James's troops. By the spring of 1689 his army was outside the walls.
The governor, Robert Lundy, fled. George Walker, a Church of Ireland clergyman, and Colonel Henry Baker took his place as joint governors.
The siege lasted 105 days. The city was relieved at the end of July. Walker's account of it came out in London the same year and made him famous. He was killed at the Boyne the next summer.
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The Walls
Built between 1613 and 1619 by The Honourable The Irish Society, the body the City of London set up to run its share of the plantation. It still owns them.
They are about one and a half kilometres round and up to eight metres high, with four original gates and three added later. Among the cannon on them is Roaring Meg.
Derry is the only city in Ireland whose walls are complete. The state has looked after them since 1955.
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Seamus Heaney
Born on the thirteenth of April 1939 at Mossbawn, a farm in the townland of Tamniarn near Castledawson. He was the eldest of nine.
He boarded at St Columb's College in Derry and read English at Queen's in Belfast. His first book, Death of a Naturalist, came out in 1966. Its first poem, Digging, has the pen resting snug as a gun.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He died in 2013 and was buried at Bellaghy, near the farm the family had moved to when he was fourteen.
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