An Srath Bán · Co. Tyrone
Eight kilometres west on the Lough Neagh shore, one of the greatest early medieval high crosses in Ireland stands in an old monastery field. Stewartstown is the place you stay to reach it.
Stewartstown sits on a drumlin ridge in east Tyrone, a village of 640 people looking south over the Lough Neagh basin. It was founded as a Plantation settlement in the early 17th century by Andrew Stewart, Lord Ochiltree - a Scottish laird from Ayrshire who arrived with thirty-three retainers in 1608, built a bawn above Lough Roughan, and over the following decade laid out a town, built a castle, and was raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Castle Stewart in 1619 for his trouble. The king called the settlement Castle Stewart; the people eventually called it Stewartstown. Both versions acknowledge who made it.
The town itself is compact and practical - a square, a few streets, two pubs, a post office. There is nothing wrong with this. Stewartstown is not primarily a destination; it is the base for something eight kilometres to the west on the shore of Lough Neagh. At Ardboe, in a field above the lake, stands the finest high cross in Ulster and one of the best-preserved in Ireland. It is 5.6 metres tall, dates to the 10th century, and carries twenty-two carved panels illustrating Old and New Testament scenes in a sandstone that has survived more than a millennium of rain and frost. The monastery that preceded it was founded around 590 AD by St Colman. The site is quiet, open, and free. There is a car park and a path through the old graveyard and nothing else - which is exactly right.
About a mile south-east of the village, visible from the Dungannon road, the ruined tower of Roughan Castle rises from a field above its small lough. Andrew Stewart built it around 1618 - a three-storey square tower with rounded corner bastions, the working architecture of a man who expected trouble in a strange country. He was right to. In 1641 the castle sheltered Sir Félim O'Neill during the Ulster Rebellion. In 1653, after the Cromwellian reconquest, O'Neill was betrayed and captured on a crannog in Lough Roughan itself, and most of his followers drowned in the water around him.
Come for the cross, stay for the lake light, and don't expect much between the two. Stewartstown is a small Tyrone village with honest pubs and a good B&B. The area around it - the Neagh shore, the drumlin roads, the ruins in the fields - is the point.