Five acres and a watchtower
The Square
The Square in Crossmaglen — formally Cardinal O'Fiaich Square — is said to be the largest market square on the island, around five acres. For most of the second half of the twentieth century one corner of it was a fortified British army and RUC base. The roads in and out of south Armagh were too dangerous to drive supplies to it, so the soldiers were rotated by helicopter. The Borucki Sangar — a watchtower named for a 19-year-old private killed by a bicycle bomb nearby in 1976 — came down on 31 July 2000. The last watchtower at the security force base was dismantled in February 2007. The Square is now a square again.
Six All-Irelands from a village
Crossmaglen Rangers
Crossmaglen Rangers GAC won the All-Ireland Senior Club Football Championship in 1997, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2011 and 2012 — six titles in fifteen years from a village of under two thousand people. No club in Ulster has come close. The training pitch sits at the south end of the village, hard up against where the army base used to be; for years the team played under-age games with a watchtower over the goal-line. Joe Kernan, who managed Armagh to the 2002 senior All-Ireland, learned his trade with the Rangers. The big board at the entrance to the grounds lists every championship the club has ever won, in a font that gets smaller as it runs out of room.
Born up the road in Cullyhanna
Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich
Tomás Ó Fiaich (1923–1990) — Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland and a cardinal — was born at An Chrosbhóthar, on the Kiltybane Road in Cullyhanna, the next parish over (Lower Creggan). He grew up speaking Irish and remained, throughout his career as a historian and archbishop, a south Armagh man. The Square in Crossmaglen was renamed for him after his death. A century after his birth a blue plaque went up on the Cullyhanna house in 2023.
On the Newry Road
St Patrick's Church
The parish church on the Newry Road dates from around 1835 — built after Catholic Emancipation, when the older church at Mobane was too small and too far from the village. It is the church of the Parish of Upper Creggan, of which Crossmaglen is the centre. Restored several times. Worth a quiet ten minutes if the doors are open.
A volcano you can drive around
The Ring of Gullion
South of the village the land starts to fold up into the Ring of Gullion — a circular formation of hills around the sacred mountain Slieve Gullion. It's a ring dyke, geologically: a circular crack in the earth that filled with magma roughly sixty million years ago and then weathered out into a clean ring of summits. Roughly forty kilometres around. The mountain at the centre is Slieve Gullion (573 m), with a Stone-Age passage tomb on the top — the highest passage tomb in Ireland, around five thousand years old. The Cailleach Bhéarra is said to live in the small lake just below the cairn.
A phrase the village would rather retire
"Bandit country"
South Armagh got the nickname from a British government minister in 1975 — Merlyn Rees, calling it bandit country in the House of Commons. The phrase stuck for thirty years of newspaper copy. Locally it cuts both ways: a sneer when used by an outsider, a half-grin when reclaimed by the people who actually live here. Twenty-five years after the Belfast Agreement the place is doing its quiet day's work and would prefer the rest of you took the phrase off the shelf.