Qualla: Castledawson

Castledawson: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Achambers481, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mossbawn, the farm where Seamus Heaney spent his first fourteen years, sits in the townland of Tamniaran, about a mile northwest of Castledawson on the road to Toome. The future Nobel laureate was born here on 13 April 1939, the eldest of nine children. He would later write that the well at Mossbawn - cold, dark, ringed with mossy stone - was where he first learned what poetry felt like: "You felt for that long time, alone in the cool darkness, that you really were in touch with the source of everything." The village down the road was where Heaney went to school, where his family worshipped, where his father bought and sold cattle at the market. Castledawson has the modest air of any small Londonderry village. It is also where one of the twentieth century's finest poets first looked into a well and saw a world.

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Image: Achambers481 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castledawson: Dawson's Bridge

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simes6600, CC BY-SA 3.0. Joshua Dawson founded the village in 1710 and it was originally called Dawson's Bridge - after the stone bridge he built across the River Moyola, then the largest single-span stone bridge in Ireland. Three years later, in 1713, he built the manor house that gave the village its m...

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Image: Simes6600 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Castledawson: The Castledawson Incident

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit taken in 2004 by Mark McCann., CC BY-SA 2.5. On 29 June 1912, the village name was briefly in newspapers across Britain and Ireland for the worst reasons. A large group of Ancient Order of Hibernians members, allegedly drunk after a parade, clashed in Castledawson with a party of Presbyterian Sunday School children who were...

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Image: taken in 2004 by Mark McCann. | CC BY-SA 2.5

Castledawson: The Soldier on the Bridge

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stuart Yeates from Oxford, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. In March 1922, during the closing months of the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Republican Army shot dead an off-duty Special Constable in Castledawson while carrying out a bomb attack on the Moyola Bridge. The dead man was a member of the Ulster Special Constabulary, the au...

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Image: Stuart Yeates from Oxford, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castledawson: Heaney Country

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Seamus Heaney spent his earliest years on his father's farm at Mossbawn, between Castledawson and Toomebridge, the eldest of nine children in a Catholic family on a rural Ulster landscape that he would later make universally recognisable. The poems of his first collection, Death ...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castledawson: Sweet Milk and Aerospace

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1943, Nestlé built a factory in Castledawson that produced sweetened condensed milk. The factory closed in the 1970s, but the building did not stand empty for long. Today the site houses Ditty's Bakery, multiple times a winner of UK speciality food awards, and Moyola Precision...

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Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castledawson: The Long Wait for a Bypass

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trevor Caruth (Uploaded by Johnnykimble), CC BY-SA 3.0. From 1971, the main A6 Belfast-to-Derry road passed through Castledawson, after the nearby Castledawson roundabout was built in anticipation of the M22 motorway extension that was never completed. The village waited for a bypass. In 1992, a single-carriageway A6 upgrade finally d...

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Image: Trevor Caruth (Uploaded by Johnnykimble) | CC BY-SA 3.0