Beautiful on a summer’s dawn as clouds skim across the low heathered hills, shadow the tiny winding roads for seconds, darken the twinkling streams, the Sperrins are different with the coming dark as chiller shadows creep across the valley floors. Walking, your pace might quicken, as you try hard not to look back, wondering if it was just the wind whistling through the tracery of the stone walls silhouetted against cloud-scudded skies. It is a fascinating region, full of contrasts and interesting towns, with mountains to the north and vales to the south.

Just west of Lough Neagh lies Cookstown with its fine main street. Eleven miles west again are the Beagh-more Stone Circles with its paired circles of tiny stones from which parallel
rows project. Close by is Drum Manor Forest Park with its butterfly garden and the Wellbrook Linen Beetling Mill (National Trust), near the source of the Owen Killen River which flows west to join the Strule River.

Cregganconroe and Creggandevesky megalithic court graves, also off the same A505, just two more of the thousands of standing stones and ancient graves scattered across the lonely moorland, should be visited at twilight, only by the self assured.

Slieve Gallion looms over Cookstown, once a linen town, whose founder built the John Nash designed Killymoon Castle, now a golf course (18), near Loughry Manor — now an agricultural college — where Dean Jonathan Swift often stayed. Portraits of his two unhappy loves, Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh) and Stella (Ester Johnson) still hang there.

Ardboe High Cross, east of the town, on the shores of Lough Neagh, dates from the 10th century and at 18ft (5.5m) is one of Ireland’s finest, carved with biblical scenes.

Tullaghoge, just 2 miles (3k) south of Cookstown, was once chief crowning place of the O’Neills, the last of the great Irish families to hold out against the plantation of the north. The coronation stone was smashed in 1602, and the rebel leader Phelim O’Neill hanged in Dublin in 1653.