Qualla: Strabane

Strabane: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk into the small National Trust shop on the main street of Strabane and you are standing where a young apprentice named John Dunlap learned to set type in the 1750s. He would emigrate to Philadelphia, publish America's first daily newspaper, and on the night of 4 July 1776 receive an urgent commission from the Continental Congress: print a document called the Declaration of Independence. The original Dunlap Broadsides - perhaps two hundred of them - went out by horseback the next morning. Strabane has the kind of past that hides in plain sight. The town has been the most bombed in Europe, the most unemployed in the industrial world, and the printing-school of an American republic. It sits, all of this, on the east bank of the Foyle, looking across at Lifford.

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Strabane: Where the Rivers Meet

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Strabane lies at the confluence: the River Mourne flows through the centre of town and meets the Finn coming up from Donegal to form the Foyle, which then runs north toward Derry and the sea. The Sperrin Mountains rise to the east, with the hill of Knockavoe forming the town's na...

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Strabane: Dunlap and Wilson

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two American stories ground themselves in Strabane. John Dunlap, born here in 1746, learned his printing trade in the shop now run by the National Trust before emigrating to Philadelphia at ten years old. By 1771 he had founded the Pennsylvania Packet, by 1784 the first American ...

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Strabane: The Hardest Decades

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1921 Strabane became a border town, separated from Lifford by an international frontier that ran down the middle of the Foyle. Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Strabane suffered. The Town Hall was destroyed in a 1972 bomb attack. The barracks beside Lifford Bridge - locally kno...

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Strabane: Five Dancing Figures

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drive out of Strabane toward the Lifford turn-off and you pass The Tinnies - five twenty-foot steel sculptures by Maurice Harron, two dancers and a fiddler on the Lifford side, a flute player on the Strabane side, and a drummer in the middle. They face each other across the road ...

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