John de Courcy's earthwork
The Mound
John de Courcy seized Ulster for the Normans after 1177 and his men built the Dromore motte and bailey shortly after — a flat-topped earthen mound with a banked enclosure beside it, set on the east bank of the Lagan to control the river crossing. It held for a century and a half. Edward Bruce, brother of Robert, came north during the Irish-Bruce wars and burned Dromore in 1315. The Mound is still there. You can walk up it. Anglo-Norman engineering, eight hundred years on, with a view down the valley.
The bishop who rebuilt the cathedral
Jeremy Taylor
Jeremy Taylor was an English theologian — Cambridge man, chaplain to Charles I, author of two prose books, "Holy Living" (1650) and "Holy Dying" (1651), that are still in print. After the Restoration he was sent to Ireland as Bishop of Down and Connor, with Dromore added on. The cathedral and the town had been burned in the 1641 rebellion. Taylor rebuilt the church in 1661 — the south and west walls of the nave are his — and was buried inside it when he died in 1667. He is the reason the place is still standing.
Eighth-century stone by the Lagan Bridge
The High Cross
The Cross of Dromore is a fragment of an 8th- or 9th-century high cross — a head with an unpierced ring and worn interlace on the underside of the arms. It stood for centuries in the marketplace, was taken down at some point, and was restored and re-erected beside the Lagan Bridge in 1887. Saint Colman's Pillow — a small stone with an early-style cross — sits inside the cathedral, returned to Dromore from Lisburn in 1919.
The railway that closed in 1956
The Viaduct
The Banbridge, Lisburn and Belfast Junction Railway opened through Dromore on 13 July 1863. The viaduct that carried it across the Lagan — seven arches, 101 metres long, 22.6 metres at its highest point, designed by Thomas Jackson — is the most striking piece of Victorian engineering in the town. The last train ran on 29 April 1956. The viaduct still stands. Dromore Town Park runs underneath it now.