Kilrea, Cill Ria, Co. Derry

Cill Ria · Co. Derry

Plantation market town on the Bann - built by London merchants, run by Monday's mart.

Kilrea is a Plantation town that never quite stopped being one. The Worshipful Company of Mercers - the London cloth-merchants' guild - were granted this stretch of the Bann in 1613, and they laid the place out the way they laid out their account books: a square in the middle, four streets running off it, a church on the high ground, a mart down the hill. The framework still holds. Walk The Diamond on a Monday morning and you can almost hear the original surveyors agreeing on the angles.

The river is the other half of the story. The Lower Bann runs past the bottom of the town and divides Derry from Antrim - Kilrea is on the Derry side, the bridge throws you into Antrim in seven arches. Downstream sits Movanagher, where the Mercers built their original headquarters before deciding the high ground at Kilrea suited them better. The DAERA fish farm now occupies the same patch of river.

It is a small town - 1,673 at the last count - and it is not pretending to be a tourist town. Three pubs on The Diamond, a tea room, a chipper, a Chinese, a mart that fills the car parks one morning a week. The reason to come is the bend of the river, the walk along the towpath, and the fact that nobody else has thought to come. That is the offer. Take it or do not.

Population

1,673 (NISRA 2021)

Walk score

Diamond to bridge in eight minutes

Founded

Plantation grant to the Mercers, 1613

Coords

54.9536° N, 6.5650° W

01 / 08

At a glance.

Three things every local will eventually mention. Read these and you've already understood more than most day-trippers do.

01 The Diamond

A Plantation square, still doing its job.

The Mercers laid out The Diamond in the 1600s as the centre of their Ulster estate. Four hundred years on it is still the centre - pubs, the war memorial, the tea room, the bus stop, the lot.

Stories & lore → 02 The bridge

Seven arches, 1783, into Antrim.

The stone bridge over the Bann was built in 1783 by Henry Roach, with stones lifted from a derelict eel weir at Portna. It carries the B64 across into County Antrim. Closed for cracks more than once in recent years - check before you drive.

Stories & lore → 03 The mart

Monday morning, half-eleven.

Kilrea Livestock Mart runs every Monday - fat lambs, hoggets, ewes, beef cattle. Run by H.A. McIlrath & Sons, the auctioneering firm in business since 1917. The town wakes up around it.

Stories & lore →

02 / 08

The pubs.

None of these are themed Irish pubs, because they don't need to be. A few that earn the trip:

Mercers Arms

Locals, sociable

Pub on The Diamond

25 The Diamond. Named for the company that planted the town. The kind of pub where the bar staff know which Monday is mart Monday because trade goes up. Food served.

Talk of the Town

TV, GAA, big match nights

Sports bar

The screen pub. Big match nights - Kilrea GAC, Ulster rugby, Premier League - fill the place. Not a quiet pint, not pretending to be.

The New Point Inn

Old-school local

Pub at 4 The Diamond

The third Diamond pub, on the corner. Long-standing local without the music-pub theatre. Order a stout and listen to whatever argument is going.

03 / 08

Where to eat.

Place	Type	€	Local note
Memory Lane Tea Room & Gift Shop	Tea room	€	13-14 The Diamond. Scones, traybakes, soup-and-sandwich lunches. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 to 4:30. Closed Sundays and Mondays and means it.
Cafe Mena	Café	€	Beside Kilrea Library. Coffee, breakfast rolls, lunch. The kind of café that the farmers stop at after the mart.
The Pizza Box	Pizza & takeaway	€	23-25 Maghera Street. Pizzas, kebabs, the standard small-town takeaway list. Wednesday to Sunday, 5pm till 11. Delivery Friday to Sunday.
Farmers Rest	Bar & food	€	20 Maghera Street. Pub and bar at the working-day end of Kilrea's eating-out options.

04 / 08

Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

Cloth merchants of London

The Mercers' town

When King James I divvied up confiscated Ulster land in 1613, the Worshipful Company of Mercers - one of the great medieval livery companies of London - drew the lot for this stretch of the Bann. They built their first manor at Movanagher, two miles downstream, then moved their estate centre up to the high ground at Kilrea. The Diamond, the church above it, and the regular street grid are all theirs. The 1641 rebellion burned much of it; they rebuilt, and the Victorian shopfronts you can still read on The Diamond date from the second wave of investment in the 1800s.

Seven arches into Antrim

Kilrea Bridge

The bridge over the Bann was built in 1783 by Henry Roach, at a cost of £2,000. Seven arches, each a twenty-five-foot span. The stone came from a redundant eel weir at Portna upstream - Plantation-era recycling. It is the river crossing that puts Kilrea on the map: the B64 from The Diamond runs straight at the bridge and into County Antrim on the other side. The cracks that close it from time to time are the cracks of a 240-year-old bridge doing a job nobody designed it for.

Trout for the country

Movanagher Fish Farm

Two miles downstream from Kilrea, on an island between the Movanagher Canal and the Lower Bann, sits the DAERA fish farm. About four hectares of concrete raceways and fibreglass tanks, raising brown and rainbow trout from egg to takeable size - 25cm and bigger - to stock the angling waters of Northern Ireland. Tens of thousands of fish a year go out of here. The site has had hard recent years: a 2025 cull of more than forty thousand fish, a stocking suspension under the Wildlife Order. Visit the riverbank; the farm itself is working ground.

McIlrath's, since 1917; the mart since 1954

The mart

H.A. McIlrath & Sons have been auctioneering in Kilrea since 1917 - valuations, estate agency, livestock - and the Kilrea Livestock Market they run on the edge of town has been going since 1954. Four weekly sales now: fat lambs, hoggets and ewes through to cattle, with seasonal breeding stock and machinery sales on top. The mart is the reason Kilrea is still Kilrea and not just a postcode - it is the weekly economic event that keeps the cafés open, fills the car parks, and gives the farmers a reason to come into town. Online bidding through MartEye now too; the buyers in the ring still matter.

Pádraig Pearse's, since 1943

Kilrea GAC

The first Gaelic football club in Kilrea was founded on 15 November 1943 as O'Cahan's Kilrea, in blue and gold. In the early 1950s it renamed itself the Kevin Barry's, in honour of the patriot, and changed to black and amber. It later took its present name - Pádraig Pearse's GAC Kilrea - and the black-and-amber jersey stuck. The club fields Gaelic football and camogie sides and remains the GAA centre of gravity in this corner of Derry, where the county line and the Mercers' grid have never quite agreed on whose town this is.

Outside First Kilrea Presbyterian

The Fairy Thorn

There is a hawthorn standing in the grounds of First Kilrea Presbyterian Church that nobody will cut. Hawthorns belong to the Sídhe in Irish folk belief - disturb one and luck leaves with it - and the tradition was strong enough that it survived the Plantation, the Presbyterian church being built around it, and four hundred years of municipal tidying. It is still there. So is the church. Make of that what you will.

05 / 08

Things to do outside.

Wear waterproofs. Bring a sandwich. Tell someone where you're going if it's the mountain.

Bann towpath from Kilrea Down from the town to the bridge, then along the old navigation towpath on the Derry bank. Quiet - heron, swans, kingfishers if you are lucky. Goes as far as Movanagher if you keep walking.

4-8 km returndistance

1-2 hourstime

Movanagher Wood Forest plantation just downriver, near the site of the original Mercers' manor and the DAERA fish farm. Mixed woodland, river views. Park at the entrance off the B64.

3 km loopdistance

45 mintime

Drumagarner road loop Quiet country road circuit out of town through dairy country. Hedgerows, farms, the kind of walk where you meet two cars and a tractor.

7 kmdistance

1h 30mtime

06 / 08

When to go.

There is no bad time. There are different times.

Spring

Mar-May

Hedges greening, lambs at the mart, the river high and brown. Long evenings starting to mean something.

◉ Go

Summer

Jun-Aug

Quietest season for a town this size - the coach traffic is on the coast, not here. Towpath walks at their best.

◉ Go

Autumn

Sep-Oct

Mart at its busiest as the year's lambs come through. Wood at Movanagher turns. Honest weather.

◉ Go

Winter

Nov-Feb

Short days, the river dark by four. Pubs still open, mart still running on Mondays. Bridge has been known to close - check before you cross.

◐ Mind yourself

07 / 08

What to skip.

Honestly? Don't bother.

If a local was sitting beside you, this is the bit where they'd lean in.

Looking for nightlife

Three pubs on The Diamond, a takeaway, the lights off by eleven on a weeknight. If you want a session, you are in the wrong town - Maghera and Garvagh are bigger; the Causeway Coast is forty minutes away.

Driving across the Kilrea Bridge without checking

The 1783 stone bridge gets closed periodically for structural cracks. The Department for Infrastructure puts notices up. If you find the B64 shut, the diversion via Portna is fifteen minutes added.

Treating it as a Causeway Coast base

It is an hour to the Giant's Causeway and 50 minutes to Portstewart. Doable, but Coleraine or Portrush are the proper bases. Kilrea is for the Bann, not the coast.

Coming on a Sunday for the mart

The mart is Monday morning. Sunday in Kilrea is church, the paper, and a quiet pint. That is the entire offer.

Getting there.

By car

Coleraine to Kilrea is 25 minutes on the A54. Belfast is just under an hour via the M2 and A26. Derry is 50 minutes via Garvagh.

By bus

Translink Ulsterbus 115 (Belfast-Magherafelt-Kilrea) and 116 (Coleraine-Kilrea) stop at Church Street. Several services daily, fewer at weekends.

By train

No station. Coleraine (25 minutes by car) is the nearest, on the Belfast-Derry line.

By air

Belfast International (BFS) is 50 minutes by car. City of Derry (LDY) is 55 minutes.

Next on the tour

Co. Derry

Garvagh

Ten minutes north on the A29. Ironmongers' plantation village, museum in the walled garden, forest trails.

Co. Derry

Maghera

Twenty minutes south. Old monastic site under Carntogher, carved twelfth-century church door, the Glenshane.

Co. Derry

Coleraine

Twenty-five minutes north. University town, lower Bann, route into the Causeway Coast.

Co. Derry

Swatragh

Eight kilometres north-east on the A29, a village that lives by its mart and its GAA.