Donemana was founded in 1609 as part of the Plantation of Ulster, the project under which James I confiscated the lands of the fled Gaelic earls and granted them to Scottish and English settlers. The man who built Donemana was John Drummond, a Scottish undertaker, who put up a bawn for defence, ten wicker-work houses for his settlers, and a watermill for grinding corn. The bawn is gone. The settlement remains. For four hundred years afterward the village was reliably Protestant and reliably unionist, voting solidly Ulster Unionist from 1973 to 1981 and then equally solidly Democratic Unionist from 1981 onward, in a county that has nationalist towns immediately to the east and west. Donemana is, in that respect, a small holdout from one of the most consequential demographic experiments in early modern British colonial history.

Why cricket should have flourished in a Tyrone village while elsewhere in Catholic Ireland Gaelic games dominated is partly a story of plantation. Cricket arrived in Ulster with British military regiments and Protestant landowners, took root in the planted parishes, and stayed there. The North-West Senior Cup, contested by clubs in the north of Ireland, became Donemana's central sporting fixation. The club's facilities at the Holm, on the village edge, look modest. The trophy cabinet is not. In a stretch of years in the 2010s, a team of teenagers from Donemana won four senior cup finals in a row, a feat unmatched anywhere on the island for more than a hundred years. The Belfast Telegraph called it the fantastic five in a row when they took a fifth in 2016. Two of the club's products, William Porterfield and Andrew McBrine, have played international cricket for Ireland. The village still turns out on Saturday afternoons when there is a match.

Donemana's other identity is geographic. The village sits at the foot of the Sperrin Mountains, the long quiet range that arcs across the middle of Northern Ireland and never quite gets the attention of the Mournes or the Antrim coast. The B48 road running south from Donemana climbs into Sperrin country via Plumbridge and Gortin, through gorse-coloured hill country and small lonelinesses. The Burn Dennett, which flows past Donemana, carries fast clear water from the high ground down to the Foyle. Above the village rises the empty stone shell of Altinaghree Castle, also called Ogilby's Castle, which William Ogilby built in 1860 and then watched his son drink to death and his other son emigrate to Australia, so that the castle was abandoned within twenty-five years. The Sperrins still hold these stories the way they hold the bogs and the cricket and the slow politics.

Donemana is still part of West Tyrone for Westminster, a constituency represented by Sinn Féin since 2001 on an abstentionist ticket, and part of the Sperrin DEA on Derry and Strabane District Council. The DEA boundaries are themselves a small example of how Northern Irish politics works. The old Glenelly DEA, of which Donemana was part, had been a unionist majority area from its creation in 1985 until 2014. When the boundaries were redrawn and Glenelly was merged with Strabane town into a new Sperrin DEA, the unionist majority dissolved into a Sinn Féin-led nationalist majority. Allan Bresland, a DUP councillor born in Donemana, sat on the council from 1993 to 2023, briefly serving as an MLA between 2007 and 2011. His successor Gary Wilkinson, also of the DUP, was co-opted in 2023. By the 2023 elections nationalists held six of the seven Sperrin seats. The village remained largely Protestant; the political map underneath it had quietly shifted.

What makes Donemana worth knowing is, in the end, what makes most plantation villages worth knowing: it has held to a particular shape for a very long time. The B49 still curves through Main Street. The Burn Dennett still pulls out under the bridge. The cricket club still trains the next generation of bowlers. The local GAA club Clann na nGael, named for the Irish-language word for the Gaels' children, still draws crowds of a different kind on Sunday afternoons. Two primary schools, one with a saint's name and one without, send their pupils on to Strabane or Derry for secondary education. Notable Donemana people include the cricketers, the politicians, Stephen O'Neill and Brian Dooher who won All-Ireland senior football titles with Tyrone, and the writer and explorer George Fletcher Moore, who became a barrister in Western Australia and wrote some of the earliest English-language descriptions of the Noongar peoples there. Even Donemana, eventually, sends its sons abroad.