Qualla: Prehen

Prehen: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The rope broke twice. John MacNaghten stood on the gallows at Strabane in 1761, having been convicted of murder, and twice the executioner's noose snapped before doing its work. By the law of the time, this entitled him to walk free - no man could be hanged three times. The crowd urged him to escape. He refused. He could not bear, he told them, being pointed at across Ireland as 'the half-hanged man'. So he climbed back up. The third rope held. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Strabane's Patrick Street Graveyard alongside his servant, and the woman whose death had brought him there was already in the family tomb at Rathmullan. The estate where the whole catastrophe began still stands above the Foyle, just south of Derry, in a townland called Prehen.

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Prehen: From the Goldsmiths to the Knoxes

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before the Plantation of Ulster in the early 1600s, the land at Prehen was held in freehold by Captain Manus O'Cahan. The plantation transferred it to the Goldsmiths' Company of London, who in turn granted the main charter in 1664 to Alexander Tomkins. He built the first proper h...

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Prehen: Mary Ann Knox

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John MacNaghten arrived at Prehen as a friend of the family. He courted Andrew Knox's only daughter Mary Ann and, by some account, tricked her into a marriage ceremony when she was sixteen and he was thirty-four. Knox refused to recognise the union, refused to release her dowry o...

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Prehen: The Prussian Owner

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Knox family held Prehen until 1910, when Colonel George Knox died and the estate passed to his grandson, Baron George Von Scheffler, husband of Baroness Kathryn Von Gahan. Von Scheffler was German-born and an officer in the Prussian Guard. When the Great War began in 1914 he ...

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Prehen: Houston's Shot

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two other Prehen stories sit in the local memory. In 1689, during the Siege of Derry, more than ten thousand Jacobite troops were entrenched in positions around Prehen, watching the city across the river. A French officer was riding at the head of his troop near the bank when a m...

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