Things to Do in County Armagh

More about County Armagh

Where to base yourself

Armagh City is the obvious base if you want to walk to things. It is small — the Mall, the two cathedrals, the museums and the restaurants sit inside a fifteen-minute walk of each other — and hotel stock is thin enough that it fills up for the Georgian Day weekend and the autumn food and cider festival. From the city you are ten minutes from Navan Fort, twenty from the National Trust houses at Ardress and Moy, and under an hour from Belfast.

If south Armagh is the point of the trip, sleep down there instead. Killeavy Castle, on the eastern slope of Slieve Gullion, is a 19th-century house reopened as a hotel and spa after a long restoration, and it puts the mountain trails a few minutes from the door. The border villages — Crossmaglen, Newtownhamilton, Dromintee — run to pubs, B&Bs and self-catering rather than hotels, which is fine if you want early starts on the hills and a session in the evening.

For the north of the county, Portadown and Lurgan are the cheap, practical option: both are on the Belfast–Dublin railway, both are minutes from the Lough Neagh shore, and Portadown is the junction where the Armagh and Belfast lines meet. Remember that Armagh is in Northern Ireland — you are paying in pounds, and cross-border day trips from Dundalk or Monaghan are easy.

South Armagh and the Ring of Gullion

The south of the county is the part people underestimate. Slieve Gullion is the high point at 573 m, and the forest park below it has a scenic drive that climbs to an upper car park; from there it is a stiff but short pull to the summit, where a Neolithic passage tomb — the highest surviving one in Ireland — sits beside a small dark lake tied up in the Fionn mac Cumhaill stories. Allow a couple of hours for the round trip and take a jacket; the summit makes its own weather.

The mountain is the plug in the middle of the Ring of Gullion, a ring dyke of low knobbly hills that circles it — the type example of the landform, and the reason the whole area is now folded into the Mourne Gullion Strangford Geopark. The ring is thick with early sites: Ballykeel Dolmen, a portal tomb known as the Hag’s Chair, and the Kilnasaggart pillar stone, cut with crosses and an inscription from around AD 700 that makes it one of the earliest datable Christian monuments in the country. Both are reached down narrow lanes with nowhere much to turn — go slowly and park considerately.

The Gap of the North is the old road into Ulster, and Moyry Castle was thrown up beside it in 1601 to hold the pass during the Nine Years’ War. West of there the Fews are quieter still, rough sheep country with a long reputation for hiding people who did not want to be found; Glassdrummond gives you a short waymarked loop into them, and Carrigatuke above Keady is the standard pull-in for the long view.

Water: the lough, the canal and the Bann

Armagh’s northern edge is Lough Neagh, the largest lake in Britain or Ireland, and Oxford Island is the easiest way onto it — a nature reserve of reedbed and scrub outside Lurgan with waymarked paths, birdwatching hides and a discovery centre. A good wet-morning option, and a good one for children.

The Newry Canal was the first summit-level canal in these islands, opened in 1742 to move Tyrone coal down to the sea, and its towpath now runs about twenty miles from Portadown to Newry as a flat traffic-free walking and cycling route. Jerrettspass is the midway stop, with a lock and an old railway bridge; the Craigmore Viaduct nearby carries the Dublin line over the valley on eighteen arches. The River Bann draws coarse anglers to the stretch above Portadown, and Camlough — the crooked lake — sits in a hollow of the Ring of Gullion with a walking loop round it.

Demesnes, woods and a castle you cannot go inside

Gosford Forest Park at Markethill was Northern Ireland’s first conservation forest park: walled garden, arboretum, deer and long easy trails. Gosford Castle stands in the middle of it, an enormous Norman-revival pile that appeared as Riverrun in Game of Thrones — but it has been converted into private apartments, so admire the exterior and leave it at that. Expect a parking charge.

Clare Glen is a river gorge walk between Tandragee and Portadown, and the reason to time a visit for late April is the bluebells; Ballymoyer Woodland is smaller and quieter, with an old church and graveyard in it. Tandragee Castle up the road has made Tayto crisps since the 1950s and runs factory tours, though they book out and are not always running — check before driving over. In Lurgan, Brownlow House is a Scottish-baronial calendar house in pale sandstone standing above Lurgan Park, one of the biggest urban parks in the North.

The city beyond the cathedrals

There is more in Armagh than the two St Patrick’s. The Robinson Library on Abbey Street, founded by Archbishop Robinson in 1771, holds Jonathan Swift’s own annotated copy of Gulliver’s Travels. The Royal Irish Fusiliers Museum on the Mall covers the county’s own regiment. The courthouse closes the north end of that Mall, with the old gaol facing it from the south — the gaol has been shut since 1986 and successive redevelopment schemes have stalled, so treat it as an exterior. Milford House is worth a detour for one odd fact: William McCrum, who lived there, invented the penalty kick in 1890.