How a London livery company built a town
The Salters' plain
When James I divvied up Ulster after the Flight of the Earls, the Worshipful Company of Salters drew the lot that ran from Lough Neagh's north-west shore up to the Vintners' and Drapers' lands. They got the grant in 1618 — twenty-three thousand acres, fifty-five townlands, more forest than they knew what to do with — and sent over an agent called Baptist Jones to make a town of it. He laid out a Diamond, named it Magherafelt after the Irish parish around it (Machaire Fíolta — Fíolta's plain, after a forgotten monk), and started selling leases. The 1641 rebellion put the torch to the lot. They came back, rebuilt, and the Diamond's been the Diamond ever since.
Heaney's bus and the Magherafelt alleyway
Route 110
There's a poem in Heaney's last collection called 'Route 110' — the number of the bus he caught from Magherafelt to Bellaghy as a young man. There's now a sculpture in an alleyway near the Magherafelt bus station: silhouettes of figures walking towards the buses, with the 'agitated rooks' from the poem flying just above their heads. It is, characteristically, not on the tourist map. Ask in the Bridewell tourist office on Church Street and they'll point you to it. Two minutes' walk. You'll have it to yourself.
Courthouse, jail, library, in that order
The Bridewell
The Bridewell on Church Street was built as a courthouse and gaol in 1804 — bridewell being the old British-and-Irish word for a holding prison. It did duty as both for most of the nineteenth century. Magherafelt's branch library opened inside its walls in 2002, and the tourist information desk runs out of a corner of it. Walking tours led by a man in town crier dress leave from outside on heritage open days. The cells are still there.
Mid Ulster's third capital
Council seat
When the 2015 local government reorganisation collapsed twenty-six councils into eleven, Magherafelt was merged with Cookstown and Dungannon into Mid Ulster District Council. None of the three towns wanted to lose its civic offices, so all three kept theirs. The Magherafelt offices are on the Ballyronan Road, the Cookstown ones on Burn Road, and Dungannon's on Circular Road. Three sets of letterhead, one council, a lot of inter-town driving.