Qualla: Dromore, County Down

Dromore, County Down: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Giorgio Galeotti, CC BY 4.0. There is a set of stocks in the Market Square at Dromore - the wooden frame in which, until well into the nineteenth century, public offenders were locked up by their ankles for the amusement and judgment of passers-by. Few towns in Ireland still have theirs. Dromore does. The square also has an eighteenth-century layout that is now legally protected, a town hall, and what one development plan described in 2003 as a quarter of its commercial units sitting vacant. The town has been on the main road between Belfast and Dublin for centuries, and was bypassed in 1972. It is the kind of small market town that has watched a lot of history go past without much help from anyone, and quietly absorbed what was left over.

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Image: Giorgio Galeotti | CC BY 4.0

Dromore, County Down: Druim Mór

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC0. The Irish Druim Mór means "large ridge," and the town sits on one, above a curve of the River Lagan. St Colman established his monastery here in 510, and the diocese of Dromore grew up around it. After the Norman invasion of Ireland in the late twelfth century, the conquistador J...

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Image: CC0

Dromore, County Down: Break of Dromore

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Stuart at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 2.0. On 14 March 1689, a Jacobite force commanded by Richard Hamilton met Williamite troops about a mile out of town on the Milebush Road. The battle that followed was short and one-sided. The Williamites, undertrained and outmaneuvered, broke and fled, leaving 400 dead on the field. ...

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Image: The original uploader was Stuart at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dromore, County Down: The Bishop and the Ballads

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Albert Bridge, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two famous bishops are buried in Dromore Cathedral. Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Bishop of Down and Connor and one of seventeenth-century England's most distinguished theologians, built the present cathedral in 1661 after the 1641 destruction. He had been chaplain to Charles I and ...

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Image: Albert Bridge | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dromore, County Down: The Man Who Made the Tractor Work

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Albert Bridge, CC BY-SA 2.0. Harry Ferguson was born on a farm at Growell, just outside Dromore, on 4 November 1884. He left school at fourteen and went to work as an apprentice mechanic. By his early twenties he had built and flown the first aircraft to take off in Ireland. By his thirties he was redesignin...

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Image: Albert Bridge | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dromore, County Down: The Years of the Bombs

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. Dromore was not spared during the Troubles. On 7 April 1976, the Provisional IRA carried out an incendiary bomb attack on a drapery shop on Market Square. William Herron, 64, his wife Elizabeth, 58, and their daughter Noleen, 26, all Protestant civilians, died in the fire that co...

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Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dromore, County Down: The Doughnut Town

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dromore today has about 6,500 people, growing slowly as commuters move out from Belfast along the A1. The 2003 town centre development plan identified what planners call the doughnut effect: new housing on the edges, an emptied-out commercial core, residents driving to Banbridge ...

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Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 3.0