Original Rootsweb Co. Tyrone Community Site
Dromore Parish Located in the Southwest of Tyrone County, Ulster
Click banner to submit/search the Project!
Dromore Parish Located in the Southwest of Tyrone County, Ulster
Dromore Parish Located in the Southwest of Tyrone County, Ulster
Also in Dullaghan on “Curran’s Mountain” a burial urn was unearthed in the past century. Stone circles were usually connected with some ritual, like burial. 10
Glengeen: On land belonging to Stephen Monaghan are the remains of a large stone circle about 41 feet in diameter. 11 Also on Charles Surplus’s property on “Allingham’s Mountain” is another ancient burial site. It is the only prehistoric site in this parish that has been excavated, as far back as 1854, when flints, bones and sherds were found here. 12 It was described as:
Remains apparently of a circular cairn with small chambers or large cists round the
circumference, of which two survive. The centre has been dug out and several
large structure stones have fallen, their original positions being uncertain.13
The early peoples who raised these monuments in the hills here, 300 to 600 feet above sea level, were our first local settlers, mainly hunters and fisher-folk. They and their successors of the Neolithic (or New Stone) Age were primitive pagans. But the latter (e.g. those who buried at Doocrock) were our first real farmers. 14 They cleared a little of the immense forestland here, planted the first few crops and raised the first livestock to graze on these hillsides. Here they worked with their crude implements of bone, wood and stone. We know very little about them, as they left no written records behind. Their successors of the Bronze Age (e.g. the builders of the stone circles at Dullaghan and Glengeen) knew something of the use of metal, as evidenced by the bronze spears found in our bogs, and the golden ornaments from the neighboring parish of Kilskeery. 15
The Celtics were, in the words of Professor Powell of Liverpool University, “the first great nation north of the Alps…The heritage of Celtic literature surviving from ancient time in Ireland and Wales, is the oldest in Europe next after Greek and Latin”. 16
The invasion of the Celts brought the Iron Age to Europe, to Ireland and to Dromore. It is from these invaders that the present day Irish descended. “Britain and Ireland were the last conquests of the Celts, and Ireland is today the only Celtic nation State left in the world.” 17
By the mid-fifth century A.D., in St Patrick’s time, this district was part of the Celtic group-kingdom of the Airghialla (or Oriel) bounded by the Foyle, Erne and Bann. 18
1010 Sean O Riordain, Antiquities of the Irish Countryside (London: University Paper-backs, 1966), p. 86
1111 PSAMNI, p. 250
1212JRSAI, vol. xv (1879-82), p.258
1313 PSAMNI (Belfast 1940)
1414 R. De Valera, op. Cit., p. 40; G. F. Mitchell, “Prehistoric Ireland” in The Course of Irish History (ed. T. W. Moody & F. X. Martin, Cork, 1967), pp.33-8
1515 G. F. Mitchell, op. Cit., pp. 39-42. Illustration (pg. 39) of a gold lunula from about 1800 BC, found at Trillick, now in the National Museum.
1616 T. G. E. Powell, The Celts (London 1963), p. 13
1717 E. Curtis, A History of Ireland (Dublin 1957)
1818 G.MacNiocaill, Ireland Before the Vikings (Dublin 1972)