8000 BC to now
Coney Island
The original Irish name is Inis Dabhaill — island of the Blackwater — because it sits opposite the river mouth. Excavations in 1962–63 found Mesolithic flints from around 8000 BC, a Neolithic settlement that ran into the Bronze Age, a 13th-century Anglo-Norman motte, and a 16th-century stone tower. The tower is the one Shane O'Neill built in the mid-1500s as a lookout and a place to stash treasure. The island fell to the English in 1567 when it was handed over to Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sydney — for a while it was even called Sydney's Island. In the 1890s the 7th Viscount Charlemont bought it, and when he died in 1913 he was entombed in O'Neill's tower. The National Trust owns it now.
The legend
St Patrick on the island
The story is that Patrick used to walk out to the island across a ford — later called St Patrick's Road — to think and pray. There's a stone on the island known as St Patrick's Stone, said to be where he sat. None of it is provable in the way an excavation is provable. But the island has been a quiet place to sit and think for a very long time, and that part is plain to anyone who goes there.
Europe's largest wild fishery
The eels
Commercial eel fishing on the Lough Neagh and Bann system is more than a hundred years old. Until the 1960s the rights were held by a London-based consortium of Dutch and English merchants, who fished the silver eels migrating down the Bann and largely shut local lake fishermen out. The Lough Neagh Fishermen's Co-operative Society was set up in 1965 to push back, and by 1972 the co-op had bought out Toome Eel Fishery (NI) Ltd outright. It is now the largest wild-caught eel producer in Europe — about 400 tonnes a year — and one of the few co-operatively owned fisheries on the continent. The HQ is at Toomebridge in County Antrim. Maghery is one of the shore villages the trade grew out of.
1322, then 1610
The grange
A papal letter of 1322 confirms the lands of Magnegraim — Maghery — to the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul at Armagh. The village was a grange of the abbey, working the church land down on the lake shore. At the Plantation of Ulster in 1610 the church holdings were taken and granted by James I to Sir Toby Caulfeild, an English soldier who ended up holding most of the diocesan land in mid-Ulster. The same Caulfeilds got the fort at Charlemont a few miles upriver. Maghery's modern history runs out of those two grants — the medieval church one and the Jacobean Caulfeild one.
2023 — a lake in trouble
The algae
In summer 2023 the lake bloomed green with toxic cyanobacteria — visible from space, the worst in living memory. The cause is decades of phosphorus pollution from agriculture and wastewater, made vicious by warming water. Microcystin levels exceeded WHO recreational limits at every site. Dogs died. The 2024 bloom came back. The fishery and the drinking-water supply both depend on the lake recovering, and recovery is slow. If you come to Maghery in July or August, the water can look beautiful or it can look like green soup. Don't swim through a bloom, don't let dogs in, and don't pretend it isn't happening.