Bessy Bell is the rounded 420m hill that rises straight behind Newtownstewart, and its Irish name – Sliabh Troim, ‘mountain of elder’ – is far older than the Scottish one painted onto it by 17th-century settlers. The climb to the top was voted Fermanagh and Omagh’s favourite walk in a council poll, and on a clear day the reward is real: the Derg Valley below, the full Sperrin range, and the hills of Donegal on the horizon.
If you only get one decision right here, make it the weather. The summit cairn is the whole point of the walk, and there is no shelter at all when the cloud comes down. The honest catch is what shares the upper slopes: two wind farms and a phone mast, and the turbines are loud enough that several walkers name the noise as the low point of an otherwise good hill.
The walk
Most people start from the car park at the Mellon Country Inn on the A5 between Omagh and Newtownstewart, following the waymarkers for the Ulster Way and International Appalachian Trail. The surface keeps changing: tarmac road at the bottom, then country lanes, then gravel tracks laid for the wind farm, and finally rough grass and heather across the open top. About halfway up you pass a holy well, once used by local people for ritual cleansing and still visible beside the path. The summit carries Donald Gorm’s cairn, a stone pile named for a legendary chieftain.
Be careful with the distance figures you’ll see quoted. The popular Bessy Bell East route is about 11.3km (7 miles) there and back, with roughly 450m of climbing and three and a half to four hours’ walking. The official Visit Derry listing gives a much longer 20.6km (12.8 miles), because it traces the full Ulster Way line rather than the straight up-and-back. Take the shorter return route unless you’re walking the long-distance trail.
Without a car you can skip the inn entirely. Take the hourly Goldline Express bus (Belfast to Derry, via Omagh) to Newtownstewart, walk up the Old Castle Road past the ruins of Harry Avery’s Castle, and you’ll reach the summit in about an hour and a quarter – a shorter, and to some minds nicer, way up.
The name and the ballad
The name came over with Scottish settlers and points back to a hill in Perthshire tied to the ballad of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray – two young women who, in the telling, fled the 1645 plague to a bower in the woods and died there after a suitor carried the sickness to them. The Tyrone hills, Bessy Bell and her smaller neighbour Mary Gray, took the borrowed names; interpretive panels along the route fill in the story as you climb.
Practical information
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Start / finish | Car park, Mellon Country Inn, Beltany Road (A5 between Omagh and Newtownstewart) |
| Distance | About 11.3km (7 miles) return on the Bessy Bell East route; Visit Derry lists a longer 20.6km Ulster Way version |
| Ascent | Roughly 450m |
| Time | 3.5 to 4 hours return |
| Difficulty | Moderate; graded strenuous by WalkNI |
| Summit height | 420m |
| Parking | Free at the inn; limited spaces on busy weekends |
| Admission | Free |
| Seasonal note | Runs through working forestry and may be diverted or closed; check before travelling |
The hill is a listed birdwatching site, with meadow-pipits and skylarks on the open slopes, most vocal early in the day. Stay on the marked paths, carry your litter out, and leave the holy well as you found it.
Nearby
- Ulster American Folk Park – a living-history museum on the A5 telling the Ulster emigration story, an easy add-on to the same trip.
- Harry Avery’s Castle – the ruins of a 14th-century O’Neill stronghold above Newtownstewart, on the foot route up the hill and a state care monument since the 1960s.
Check the forecast and the forestry notices before you set out: the bare summit gives you nowhere to wait out a squall, and the working forest the path crosses is occasionally closed.