A London livery company in south Derry
The Drapers' town
The Plantation of Ulster in 1610 carved the confiscated O'Neill lands into estates and handed them to the twelve great livery companies of London — drapers, skinners, salters, vintners, ironmongers and the rest. The Drapers got Moneymore and, later, Draperstown up the road. They were absentee landlords by the standard of the day: a manager on the ground, a steady stream of rent back to London, and a programme of building — market houses, schools, churches, almshouses — to look respectable about it. By 1817 the Company had spent a fortune tidying the village up and rebuilding most of what had gone to seed in the previous century. Sir William Lenox-Conyngham at Springhill was their last agent. The estate was wound down by 1906 and the Company disposed of the last of it shortly after.
An early scheme, possibly a first
The piped water
Pynnar's survey of the Plantation, made for the Crown around 1619, recorded six good houses of stone and lime here, all supplied with water carried in wooden pipes from a well near the limestone quarry at Spring Hill. Local boasts make it the first town in Ireland to have piped water — that's hard to verify, and the date 1615 gets thrown about more confidently than the records support. What is certain is that when the high street was lowered in the 19th century, workmen dug up sections of the original wooden mains: the timber crumbled to dust, the iron hoops survived in fair condition, and a few are kept locally.
The ghost the National Trust put on the brochure
Olivia at Springhill
George Lenox-Conyngham served under Castlereagh in the Irish Volunteers, fell out with him over the 1798 business, and never recovered his nerve. In 1816 he carried a pistol up to his bedroom at Springhill and shot himself, with his second wife Olivia just outside the door. Olivia is said to have walked the upstairs landing of the house ever since — guilty, fond of children, generally well-behaved. During the Second World War American officers billeted at Springhill asked for a cot in the nursery to be removed because of a knocking sound it made on its own. The cot was removed. The knocking stopped. After the war the cot came back. The knocking came back with it. The Trust now markets her, mildly.
The reservoir over the Tyrone line
Lough Fea
Five minutes south of the village the dual carriageway is signposted for Lough Fea — a 180-acre moorland lake in the Sperrins that has supplied the drinking water for half this corner of Mid-Ulster since 1965. It is technically over the line in Tyrone but every Moneymore household has been drinking it for sixty years. There's a flat 4km path around the shore, brown trout and pike for those who fish, and a view of the Sperrins that earns the detour. A fair swap for a place that piped its own water four hundred years ago.