12th-century stone, still in place
The carved door
The west doorway of St Lurach's old church is the find. Above it, carved into the lintel, is a crucifixion scene — Christ flanked by fifteen figures and four angels, weathered down through eight hundred years of Mid-Ulster rain. The carving was likely set there in the 12th century, probably after the cathedral burned in 1135. Only two other Irish examples survived from that period: one at Raphoe in Donegal, one at Dunshaughlin in Meath. There is no ticket, no glass case, no guide. You walk up through the graveyard and there it is.
The Presbyterian who's still on the team-sheet
Watty Graham
Walter Graham — Watty — was a Presbyterian tenant farmer and church elder from outside Maghera. In June 1798 he mustered several hundred men, held the town for a morning, and marched on to Crewe Hill before news arrived that McCracken had been defeated at Antrim. The rebellion collapsed. Graham was hanged on 19 June 1798, traditionally from a tree at the Church of Ireland rectory in the town; his head was paraded through the village afterwards. The local GAA club in Glen took his name. They beat St Brigid's of Roscommon 2-10 to 1-12 on 21 January 2024 to win the All-Ireland Senior Club Football Championship for the first time. The trophy came home through the town in the rain.
How Maghera lost its cathedral
The bishop and the move
From the mid-1100s, Maghera was a cathedral town — the seat of the diocese of Cenél nEóghain, known in Latin as Rathlurensis after the older name Ráth Lúraigh. The arrangement lasted roughly a hundred years. In 1246, after repeated complaints about how cut off the place was, Bishop Germanus O'Carolan got Pope Innocent IV's sanction to transfer the see to Derry. By 1254 the diocese was formally called Derry. The town has been quietly putting up with that decision ever since. The old church stayed in use as a parish church into the 18th century before the roof gave up.
Upperlands and the Clark mills
The linen village
Three miles north of the town, in Upperlands, Jackson Clark started a linen beetling operation in 1736 on a dark narrow stretch of river. The firm, William Clark & Sons, is still going nearly three hundred years on — Northern Ireland's oldest linen mill and the last commercial beetlers left in the world. The terraces of mill workers' housing in the village are intact. If you want to understand why this corner of Mid-Ulster looks the way it does — Presbyterian, industrial, prosperous in a quiet way — the mill at Upperlands is the answer.
The road over the hill
The Glenshane
The A6 climbs out of Maghera through the Glenshane Pass — the gap between the Carntogher hills on the north side and the rest of the central Sperrins on the south. The road is the main artery between Belfast and Derry, and it's the reason Maghera exists in the modern shape it does: the market town on the eastern foot of the pass. In bad winters the road shuts and the town goes quiet for a day or two. People remember which winters.