Dungannon
Dún Geanainn, Co. Tyrone

The O'Neills ruled most of Ulster from this hill. They burned the castle themselves rather than hand it over.

Dungannon sits in mid-Tyrone where the drumlin country flattens briefly into a market town that has been at the centre of things for longer than most Irish towns can claim. The hill in the middle is the reason - high enough to see seven of the nine Ulster counties on a clear day, which made it exactly the kind of ground that gets fought over. The O'Neill kings of Ulster chose it in the 14th century and kept it for nearly 300 years.

The town Hugh O'Neill left behind in 1602 - his castle burned, the Nine Years' War ending badly - became a linen town by the 18th century and one of the more prosperous ones in the North. By the 1820s the Thursday market in Market Square was drawing Belfast buyers every week. The trade disappeared with industrialisation and the mills of Belfast and Lisburn, but the grid of streets around Market Square still reads like a prosperous linen town, which is what it was.

In 1968, Dungannon became the starting point of something else. On 24 August, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association organised a march from Coalisland three miles to Dungannon - 2,500 people, protesting the allocation of public housing to a 19-year-old Protestant woman ahead of two large Catholic families in the same area. A police cordon blocked entry to Market Square, where a counter-demonstration had gathered. The march stopped. No one was hurt. It was, the historians note, Northern Ireland's last bloodless civil rights march. October in Derry changed that. But the sequence started here.

The town today is a working mid-Ulster market centre - a large Dungannon Park on the southern edge, the Hill of The O'Neill visitor centre on Market Square, a food scene that punches modestly above its weight, and a glass-making heritage that traces back to 1771. Tyrone Crystal, founded in 1971, closed its Dungannon factory in 2010. A successor operation, Tyrone Crafted Glass, opened in 2021 run largely by former employees, though it has faced relocation pressure since. The hill is still there, and the view is still the view.