2 Best Sights in Tyrone, Northern Ireland

The excellent Ulster American Folk Park re-creates a Tyrone village of two centuries ago, a log-built American settlement of the same period, and the docks and ships that the emigrants to America would have used. The centerpiece is an old whitewashed cottage, now a museum, which is the ancestral home of Thomas Mellon (1813–1908), the U.S. banker and philanthropist. Another thatch cottage is a reconstruction of the boyhood home of Archbishop John Hughes, founder of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. There are full-scale replicas of Irish peasant cottages, a New York tenement room, immigrant transport ship holders, plus a 19th-century Ulster village, complete with staff dressed in period costumes. The Mellon Centre for Migration Studies contains 16,000 books and periodicals, an Irish emigration database including passenger lists from 1800 to 1860, emigrant letters, and maps of geographical regions of both Ireland and America. Other notable exhibits include William Murray's drapery store and W. G. O'Doherty's original candy store on the bustling Ulster Street, where visitors can explore the world of retail therapy in the early 1900s.

Deep in the wild Sperrin Mountains of Tyrone a lack of light pollution allows for astonishing views of the night sky and creates an ideal location for seeing crystal-clear star constellations. Northern Ireland's first dark-sky observatory opened in Davagh Forest in the secluded foothills of the mountains in spring 2020 at a cost of £1.2 million. The new center houses a retractable roof, observatory, and telescope showcasing the dark-sky site, combining technology from holographic installations to virtual reality headsets and interpretation panels to explore the solar system. On a cloud-free night you may be lucky enough to see the Milky Way, the Perseid meteor shower (if here in August), or deep-sky objects such as the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula, and depending on conditions, the northern lights. The centerpiece of the observatory is the 14 inch LX600 Meade telescope which enables stunning images to be captured. Talks and star-gazing events are held in the evenings to account for night sky activity at certain times of the year. VIP tours can also be arranged in advance and cost from £40. The significance of the stars to ancient life, forms part of the experience linking the landscape with the archaeological and astronomical heritage of the Sperrins. This entails a delightful walk along a new adjoining boardwalk leading to the Beaghmore Bronze Age stone circles, a wonderfully atmospheric location classified as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The circles were uncovered by turf cutters in the 1940s and evidence was revealed of a ceremonial site with alignments and cairns while the concentration of stones was dated to between 1500 and 800 BC. Catch the right day and this bleak landscape glows with a magnetic quality when the sun appears.