County Tyrone
Tír Eoghain
- IrishTír Eoghain
- ProvinceUlster
- County townOmagh, by tradition
- Local governmentNo county council since 1973. The county lies in three districts: Mid Ulster; Fermanagh and Omagh; Derry City and Strabane
- Area3,266 km²
- Population188,383 (2021)
- Highest pointSawel, 678 m, shared with Derry
Benburb
On the fifth of June 1646 Owen Roe O'Neill met the Scottish Covenanter army under Monro at Benburb, in east Tyrone.
Monro wanted a fight. He pushed his men forward late in the day and attacked uphill, into the setting sun. O'Neill's Ulster troops, with shortened pikes, broke them. The Covenanters lost over three thousand men, and Monro fled back to Antrim.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography calls it the greatest victory ever won by an Irish commander on native soil. Three years later O'Neill was dead, at Clough Oughter.
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Tullaghoge Fort
A hilltop enclosure with views for miles. By the eleventh century it was a dynastic centre and the inauguration place of Cenél nEógain, the line that became the O'Neills.
After the plantation it passed to settlers. The widow of a planter, Robert Lindsey, was living there in 1619. By 1622 it was abandoned.
A path climbs to it from a small car park at the foot of the hill.
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Brian O'Nolan
Born on the fifth of October 1911 at 15 Bowling Green, Strabane, the third of twelve children. His father, a customs officer, had been posted there in 1897.
He was a civil servant in Dublin from 1935. As Flann O'Brien he published his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, in 1939. It was neither a critical nor a commercial success. His second, The Third Policeman, found no publisher. He said the typescript was lost. It was published after his death, to great acclaim.
As Myles na gCopaleen he wrote the Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times from 1940 to 1966, in Irish, in English, and in languages of his own.
He died on April Fool's day, 1966.
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