Machaire Fíolta · Co. Derry
A Salters' plantation town built around a Diamond, with Heaney country starting six miles up the road.
Magherafelt is a town that wears its plantation history on its street plan. The Worshipful Company of Salters of London were granted twenty-three thousand acres here in 1618, and their first agent - a man called Baptist Jones - laid out the settlement around a central Diamond. The 1641 rebellion burnt the lot to the ground, the Salters rebuilt, and four hundred years later the Diamond is still the Diamond. Walk a hundred yards in any direction and you've left the planned town and entered the parish.
What it actually is now: a market town of about nine thousand people, council seat of Mid Ulster, halfway between Belfast and Derry on the A6. The mix is roughly six-to-three Catholic-to-Protestant by background, and unlike louder parts of the North the two communities mostly get on with the same Friday-night business. There's a Presbyterian congregation that goes back to the early 1700s, a Church of Ireland - St Swithin's - out on the Cookstown Road, and a Catholic parish that keeps the school numbers up.
The reason a visitor ends up here is usually Heaney. Mossbawn farm - where the poet was born in 1939 - sits between Castledawson and Toomebridge, six miles south. Bellaghy, where he chose to be buried, is six miles east. The HomePlace centre in Bellaghy is the destination, but Magherafelt is the town that fed those farms, and the alleyway sculpture by the bus station - silhouettes walking under the rooks of 'Route 110' - is the local's pilgrimage. Stay here, drive to Bellaghy in the morning, walk Lough Beg in the afternoon. That's the trip.
