Once a week, buyers came from across Europe
The great horse fair
Moy fair began as a regular livestock market in the newly laid-out village of the 1760s and grew into something much larger over the following century. At its height it was one of the most significant horse fairs in Ireland - dealers arrived from England, Scotland, and continental Europe, the square filled with animals, and the dealing went on for days. The fair that had once dominated the economy of mid-Ulster faded through the 20th century as road transport, bloodstock auctions, and two world wars changed how horses were bought and sold. It no longer runs. The name Horse Fair Meadows, on the housing estate at the edge of the village, is what the fair left behind.
An Italian piazza in County Tyrone
The square and the Grand Tour
James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont (1728-1799), was one of the 18th century's great cultural travellers - he spent nearly ten years in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean and came back a changed man. When he laid out Moy in the 1760s he modelled the market square on the piazza at Bosco Marengo in Lombardy, a small town in Piedmont he had admired during his Grand Tour. The square's unusual width and geometry for an Ulster village is the direct result: a continental idea transplanted to the Blackwater Valley. Caulfeild went on to found the Royal Irish Academy and was known as the Volunteer Earl for his support of the Irish Volunteer movement. The square he left behind is his most visible legacy.
The Tyrone connection to Austen's first love
Thomas Lefroy and Jane Austen
Thomas Langlois Lefroy (1776-1869) was born in Limerick - his father was an army officer posted there - but the family had deep roots in the Moy area and County Tyrone, where his sister Lucinda later lived and died. In December 1795, at a Hampshire ball, the nineteen-year-old Lefroy - then a law student at Lincoln's Inn - met a twenty-year-old Jane Austen. The flirtation that followed was sharp and mutual. Austen wrote to her sister that she had danced twice with a 'very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man' and that they were 'considerably related'. By January 1796 the two families had decided the attachment was going nowhere: Lefroy needed to marry money, and Austen had none. He departed. She never forgot. Lefroy went on to become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland (1852-1866) and died at 93. Late in life he admitted to having been 'in love' with Austen - but added that it had been 'a boyish love'. Scholars have suggested he is the original of Mr Darcy. He is buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.
1602 - built to hold the Blackwater
Charlemont Fort across the bridge
Walk east from the square, cross Dargan's triple-arched stone bridge (built 1855, County Armagh side), and you're standing in front of what survives of one of the most strategically important forts in Ulster history. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, had it built in the summer of 1602 at the end of the Nine Years' War to lock down the Blackwater crossing - a star fort with four earthen bastions, one of the most modern military works in Ireland at the time. It was seized by Sir Phelim O'Neill in 1641, besieged by Cromwell's forces in 1650, garrisoned until the 19th century, and burned by the IRA in July 1920. The 17th-century gatehouse survived the fire. The earthwork bastions are still legible in the grass behind it. The rest is the field.