Ridgeway, 1615
Spur Royal Castle
In 1613, as part of the Plantation of Ulster, James I granted 315 acres around Augher to Sir Thomas Ridgeway, who had served as Treasurer at War for Ireland. Ridgeway was required under the grant terms to settle twenty English or Scottish tradesmen and artificers in the town within four years. He did well enough that James granted Augher a borough charter within two years. Around 1615 Ridgeway built his fortified house on a rise overlooking the settlement - a square, three-storey Plantation castle with triangular projecting towers at each angle. He called it Spur Royal. By 1630 ownership had passed to Sir James Erskine, and in 1641, during the Irish Rebellion, the castle was attacked and successfully defended. In 1689 the Jacobites burnt it. The Richardson family, who held the estate well into the 19th century, restored it in 1832 - adding the two castellated wings that give the building its present silhouette. It stands today as a private residence, visible from the road at the edge of the village.
Clogher Valley Railway, 1887-1942
The valley and the railway
The Clogher Valley Railway opened its Augher station on 2 May 1887 - a narrow-gauge line running along the valley floor connecting Maguiresbridge in Fermanagh with Tynan in Armagh, passing through Clogher, Augher, and Ballygawley. It was never a busy line. It served the farms and small towns of the valley for fifty-five years before closing on 1 January 1942. The station building survived the line and eventually reopened as a cafe. The railway's trace can still be read in the landscape - embankments, cuttings, the rhythm of the valley floor - for those who know what they are looking at.
St Mac Cairthinn, c.430 AD
Clogher and the golden stone
One kilometre west of Augher, Clogher has been a religious site since before Patrick's mission. The hill is said to have held a gold-covered pagan oracle stone - Cermand Cestach, the Golden Stone - sacred to the druids and described by a 15th-century annalist as still sitting in the cathedral porch in his time. Around 430 AD, St Aedh Mac Cairthinn, one of Patrick's early disciples, founded a monastery on the site. The Synod of Rathbreasail recognised it as an episcopal see in 1111. The Cathedral Church of Saint Macartan - Church of Ireland, Diocese of Clogher - stands there now, one of two cathedrals of that diocese (the other is at Enniskillen). A kilometre away in either direction you have a Plantation castle and a Neolithic passage tomb. Clogher has been collecting layers for a long time.
Neolithic passage tomb, c.3000 BC
Knockmany and the carved stones
Two kilometres north-west of Augher, Knockmany Hill rises steeply from the valley floor to around 700 feet. On its summit is a chambered cairn built around 3000 BC - a passage tomb without a formal passage, its chamber formed by thirteen sandstone orthostats standing three to seven feet high. Three of those stones are carved with spirals, concentric circles, and zigzag motifs: megalithic art in the same tradition as the decorated stones at Loughcrew and Newgrange. The original cairn was covered by a concrete protective structure in 1959. The Discover Northern Ireland 'Spirit of Knockmany' guided walk covers the hill in about two hours from the forest car park below.