Named by a London cloth guild
The Drapers' town
After the 1609 Plantation of Ulster, the lands of Ballinascreen parish were divided between two London livery companies. The Drapers took everything west of the crossroads — Straw, Sixtowns, Moneyneena — and the Skinners took the east. The Drapers built a courthouse at the crossroads in 1812 and finally put the name Draperstown on the village in 1818, having previously used it for what is now Moneymore. The Post Office adopted it. The locals took longer, and in some corners haven't fully agreed yet.
Irish brought back, the slow way
Carn Tóchair
Drive twenty minutes east toward Maghera and you reach An Carn at the foot of Carntogher Mountain — the hub of Carntogher Community Association, founded in 1992 to push back against rural decline and to bring the Irish language back into ordinary use. The same year they opened Naíscoil Charn Tóchair, the first rural Irish-medium pre-school outside of the Gaeltacht; a primary school followed the year after. Today there is a shop, a coffee house, a youth club, a small theatre, and a community that speaks Irish because it wants to, not because a sign says it should.
The only Dark Sky Place in Northern Ireland
OM Dark Sky at Davagh
Twenty minutes south-west of Draperstown, Davagh Forest sits on 1,500 hectares of Sperrin foothill that used to be just trees and a forestry road. In 2020 Mid Ulster Council opened the OM Dark Sky Observatory and Visitor Centre on the edge of it, and the whole forest got International Dark Sky Place status — the only one in Northern Ireland. The mountain-bike trails run by day; the observatory runs by night; the Beaghmore Stone Circles sit in the same patch of bog, four thousand years older than either.
The mountain that watches the town
Slieve Gallion
528 metres on the eastern edge of the Sperrins, the first thing you see coming in from any direction. A small road runs most of the way up to a transmitter on the lower summit — you can drive nearly to the top and walk the last bit. From the cairn the view runs out over Lough Neagh on a clear day; on a bad day the cloud sits at four hundred metres and the town below disappears. The Drapers picked this spot because the land was good and the mountain was a landmark for miles. It still is.