Beragh, Beárach, Co. Tyrone

A mid-Tyrone crossroads where the GAA club is the civic calendar and the landscape does all the talking.

Beragh is a small village in mid-Tyrone - population 694 at the last census, one main street, open farmland in every direction. It is the kind of place that does not announce itself. It sits on the B46 between Omagh and Cookstown, in the historic parish of Clogherny, about eight miles southeast of Omagh and a few miles south of where the land starts to lift toward the Sperrins. The mountains are visible on clear days. Most days are not entirely clear.

What holds the community together is not commerce - there is limited commerce - but the GAA club. Beragh Red Knights play their football at St Mary's Park, the ground the club acquired in 1954 and formally opened, after substantial development, in July 1974. The name Red Knights was Frank Rodgers's invention, settled in 1972, the same year he began a twenty-four-year stint as club secretary. Before that the club had gone through several names and several periods of dormancy since its first formation in the early 1920s. The intermediate championships of 1993 and 2000 are the titles that sit on the board. They are the ones the village counts.

Clogherny parish has been agricultural land since before the Ordnance Survey documented it in the 1830s. The original survey note recorded about 8,000 arable acres, inhabitants principally employed in farming and linen weaving. The linen is gone. The farming continues. In the 1820s the village was described without sentiment as having 'one long wide street of very mean houses'. The houses are more substantial now. The street is still long. The sentiment still tends toward the plain.