Brocagh, Brocach, Co. Tyrone

A small community on the Lough Neagh shore with a ruined Elizabethan castle on the hill above it - begun in the final years of the Nine Years War.

Brocagh sits on the western shore of Lough Neagh, about seven kilometres east of Coalisland in east Tyrone. The name comes from the Irish Brocach - badger warren. The lough is the largest body of fresh water in Ireland and Britain and its western shore runs flat and open here, reed-fringed and often grey. The village itself is small: scattered houses, a church, a GAA pitch, a road running to the water's edge.

The thing that marks this place on a map is Mountjoy Castle, a ruin on the hill above the village overlooking the lough. Construction began in the summer of 1602 and was completed around 1605 - the final phase of the Nine Years War, the long Gaelic Irish resistance to English expansion - by Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who was Queen Elizabeth's Lord Deputy. The castle is built of red clay bricks, manufactured locally at Coalisland, and sits on a slight rise with a clear view of the lough and the low Armagh shore beyond it. It changed hands several times during the seventeenth century - captured and recaptured in 1641, 1642, and 1645 - and King William's forces used it in 1690. The walls still stand, two storeys of them, with four angled corner towers.

The civil parish is Clonoe. The Church of St Brigid at Brocagh is within that parish. Brocagh Emmetts GAC has been running football in this community since 1923, when the club was formed under the name Mountjoy Emmetts. The name changed to Brocagh in the late 1970s.