Fivemiletown
Baile na Lorgan

Five Irish miles from everywhere. A narrow-gauge railway once ran straight down the main street at 10 mph, and the creamery it served has been making cheese since 1898.

Fivemiletown sits in the Clogher Valley in south Tyrone, on the A4 between Dungannon and Enniskillen, with the Fermanagh border close enough to feel underfoot. The name is a measure - five Irish miles, which is longer than you think, from each of three nearby towns: Clogher, Brookeborough and Tempo. The village was founded in 1619 by Sir William Stewart, who called it Mount Stewart. The long green that runs down the centre of Main Street has been there since the planned streets were first laid out.

For fifty-four years, from 1887 to 1941, a narrow-gauge railway ran straight down the middle of that main street. The Clogher Valley Railway was 37 miles of 3-foot track, connecting Tynan in County Armagh to Maguiresbridge in Fermanagh, and Fivemiletown was its second-largest station. The trains stopped at the Buttermarket and at the creamery for loading and unloading. The top speed was 10 miles per hour. The railway operated at a loss for most of its existence - the greatest profit the company ever made, in 1904, was £791. The last train ran on New Year's Eve 1941, a casualty of road competition and wartime cost-cutting. The station house survives.

The creamery that gave the railway a reason to stop here is still in operation. Founded in 1898 as a farmers' co-operative, it became Northern Ireland's only speciality cheese maker - producing Ballyblue, described as the first blue cheese developed in Ireland, as well as the smoked Ballyoak brie and a range of cheddars. It was acquired by Dale Farm in 2014. It draws milk from dairy farmers across Northern Ireland.

The village is quieter than its position on a main cross-border route might suggest, though the heavy A4 traffic through the narrow one-way main street is one of its persistent frictions. The surrounding countryside - Murley Mountain to the northwest, the source of the River Blackwater just to the north, small lakes drawing anglers - is open and accessible, and Blessingbourne Estate, with its 550 acres of woodland, lakes and mountain bike trails, sits just outside the village boundary.