Tyrone, County, is the largest of the six historic counties of Northern Ireland. The county ceased to be an administrative area when local government was reorganized in 1973. However, local people continue to recognize County Tyrone as a distinct region and still refer to it as a county. It has an area of 1,260 square miles (3,263 square kilometers). Its chief town is Omagh.
County Tyrone lies inland. It is bounded by the historic County Londonderry to the north, Lough Neagh (Lake Neagh) to the east, the historic County Armagh to the southeast, the historic County Fermanagh to the southwest, and the Republic of Ireland to the south and northwest.
The central part of County Tyrone consists of flat, low-lying bog and moorland. In the north, the summit of Sawel in the Sperrin Mountains rises 2,224 feet (678 meters) above sea level. In the south, the local rock consists mostly of sandstone and limestone. The upland and boggy areas are infertile. But there are fertile valleys drained by the Blackwater and Ballinderry rivers, which flow eastward into Lough Neagh. In the west, the rivers Glenelly, Owenkillew, and Strule form a system of waterways that combine in the River Mourne to flow through the town of Strabane and into the Foyle above a wide estuary. The Clogher Valley in south Tyrone is extremely fertile and crosses the best woodland and agricultural land in the county.
Economy.
County Tyrone is traditionally a farming area. Its hundreds of small farms are devoted to cattle and dairy products. They also produce barley, grass seed, oats, and potatoes. Service industries employ most of the workers in the county. Such industries include education, government services, health care, trade, and transportation. The manufacturing and construction sectors are also important sources of employment.
History.
County Tyrone has many prehistoric monuments. They include tombs of the pre-Gaelic inhabitants of Ireland. The county takes its name from the Irish Tir Eoghain, which means the land of Eoghain, or Owen. Owen was the son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, a famous king of Ulster in pre-Christian times.
From the 400’s to the 1500’s, Tyrone was the center of the territory ruled by Niall’s descendants, the O’Neill family. Successive chieftains of the O’Neills held court first at Tullyhogue, and later at nearby Dungannon. Until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, this part of Ulster remained the most Gaelic area of Ireland, and it was the last to fall under English influence.
Hugh O’Neill, an Irish chief who grew up in England, rebelled against Elizabeth I at the end of the 1500’s. After nine years of war, O’Neill surrendered in 1603, unaware that the queen had died only a few days earlier. His surrender marked the end of Gaelic resistance in County Tyrone, and the coronation stone of the O’Neills at Tullyhogue was broken by the English commander, Mountjoy. Hugh O’Neill accepted the English title of Earl of Tyrone, a title he previously held, and agreed to the replacing of the Irish Brehon law with English law. But in 1607, with his ally, Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Tirconnell (Donegal), he suddenly fled to France and then to the Spanish Netherlands. This event, which is called the “Flight of the Earls,” opened the way for King James I’s Plantation of Ulster, in which English and Scottish colonists were given grants of land in the northern part of the island of Ireland.
After the Flight of the Earls, the vast O’Neill estates were taken over by the British monarch, and portions of them were granted to Scottish and English “Undertakers,” who agreed, or undertook, to “plant” them with their own tenants. They were not able to do this completely, and many of the original Irish inhabitants remained on the lands as tenants. This fact is partly responsible for the religious and political divisions of the county today.
At Benburb in 1646, a Scottish army led by General Robert Munro was defeated by the Irish under Owen Roe O’Neill. In 1782, Dungannon was the setting for one of the most famous events in Irish history, when the delegates of 143 regiments of the Irish Volunteers met in the parish church to demand the independence of the Irish parliament. This meeting enabled Henry Grattan and his Irish “patriots” to form a short-lived Irish parliament that was ended by the Act of Union in 1800.
