What the trees replaced
The first conifer forest park in Northern Ireland
Gortin Glen Forest Park was not a natural woodland. The Sperrin slopes above the village were planted as a commercial timber operation - Sitka spruce, larch, and other conifers in the post-war forestry drive that reshaped large areas of upland Northern Ireland and Ireland. When the Forest Service opened it as a public park in 1967, it was the first forest park in Northern Ireland established in a coniferous plantation rather than in existing broadleaf woodland. The landscape inside the park is largely that plantation forest, interspersed with open ground and the Owenkillew river valley running through its lower section. The Sika deer, wildfowl, and the waymarked trail network were built around it over subsequent decades.
What the name says about the land
An Goirtín - the small enclosed field
The Irish name an Goirtín means 'the small enclosed field.' It is not a dramatic toponym - no battle, no saint, no castle. A small field that was enclosed, probably for tillage in a landscape where enclosure was worth naming. The wider parish was called Badoney - Badhanaigh in Irish, an older territorial name whose meaning is less certain. The 1845 Ordnance Survey memoir describes the village as 410 people in 81 houses in one irregular street. It mentions a brewery, closed by the time of writing, and a story about an excise officer from Omagh who came to inspect it and was never seen again. That story has not been verified.
The road that runs through the mountains
The Glenelly Valley east of the village
Drive east out of Gortin and the road follows the Glenelly River into the heart of the Sperrins. The Glenelly Valley is one of the more remote inhabited valleys in Northern Ireland - a long agricultural lowland between steep moorland ridges, with scattered farms and small communities the length of it. The Ulster Way follows this valley on its stage to Moneyneany in County Derry, and Frommers describes the section as one of the most scenic portions of the Sperrin mountains. The valley floor road is quiet enough that the Ulster Way uses it directly. On a clear autumn morning with the heather on the ridges above, it is one of the more striking drives in northwest Ulster.