How William Stewart drew the longest main street in Ireland
The planned town
Cookstown started with a market patent. In 1628 Charles I granted Dr. Alan Cooke the right to hold markets and fairs in what was still a small Plantation settlement - the name stuck even as the Cooke family's influence faded. By 1671 the surrounding land had passed to William Stewart of Killymoon, and it was the Stewarts who gave the town its defining shape. Inspired by the Wide Street Commission's Georgian street-planning in Dublin, they set out a boulevard 135 feet wide and just over a mile long, planted with lime trees, connecting the Killymoon demesne to the old settlement at the north end. The plans were laid out across the second half of the 18th century, fully in place by the 1790s. Today the same single axis carries seven different street names - Killymoon Street through to Milburn Street - but it is obviously, unmistakeably one long decision. No town in Ireland has anything quite like it.
Four thousand years of monuments, invisible until the 1930s
Beaghmore - the stone circles under the bog
The Beaghmore complex sits on Tyrone moorland about 13 km south-west of Cookstown, near the foothills of the Sperrins. The monuments - seven stone circles, ten stone rows, twelve cairns - were built and modified over a long period beginning around 2900 BC; the circles and cairns are generally attributed to around 1200-2000 BC. All of it was buried under growing peat and completely invisible until the late 1930s, when peat-cutting operations broke through the surface and began exposing the stones. Excavations continued into the 1940s and beyond. The most striking feature is Circle E - the Dragon's Teeth - packed with over 800 small upright stones, unlike any of the other six rings. The stone rows are astronomically aligned, though scholars argue about the specifics. There is no café, no admission gate, and no crowds; the Department for Communities manages the site. Come early or come late.
The last water-powered beetling mill in Ireland
Wellbrook and the linen trade
Ulster's linen industry was built on a sequence of specialised processes - scutching, hackling, weaving, bleaching, and finally beetling - and by the 18th century the Ballinderry valley west of Cookstown was full of mills performing each stage. Beetling is the last: the woven cloth is hammered with heavy wooden mallets driven by waterwheel, which closes the weave and gives linen its particular smooth sheen. The mill at Wellbrook on the Ballinderry River was built around 1764 and continued working until 1961. When commercial linen production collapsed, most mills were demolished. Wellbrook survived because the National Trust acquired it; the original machinery - the great wooden beams, the waterwheel, the hammers - is still there and still demonstrated on guided tours. It is one of the very few places you can watch a pre-industrial textile process running as it was designed to run.
Where each O'Neill was made lord of Ulster, until 1595
Tullyhogue and the O'Neill inauguration
The hill fort at Tullyhogue, 4 km south-south-east of Cookstown, is an Iron Age earthwork that became, in the later medieval period, the ritual centre of O'Neill power. The ceremony of inauguration was carefully choreographed: O'Cahan, the O'Neill's principal sub-chief, threw a golden sandal over the new lord's head as a gesture of good fortune; O'Hagan, hereditary guardian of Tullyhogue, placed the shoe on his foot and presented him with a white rod of office. The last inauguration was in 1595, when Hugh O'Neill - later to lead the Nine Years' War - received the title An Ó Néill on this hill. In 1602, with the war going against the Gaelic lords, Lord Mountjoy marched to Tullyhogue and had the inauguration stone smashed - a deliberate act to destroy the legitimacy it conferred. The earthwork itself survives. There is a small car park; the hill is a five-minute walk up through grazing land.