Cookstown's main street runs dead straight for a mile and a quarter, and at the north end it simply stops at a mountain. Slieve Gallion closes the view. The street was laid out roughly 135 feet wide and planted with trees by the Stewart brothers, William and James, who took over Allan Cooke's confiscated lands and modelled their new town on Dublin's Wide Streets Commission. It is claimed to be the longest main street in Ireland, and standing at one end you can believe it.
Cooke was the English lawyer leased the land in 1609, in the townland of Corcrigagh, and the town still carries his name. The Irish is a' Corr Críochach, "the boundary hill." Charles I granted it twice-weekly markets for livestock and flax in 1628, and the produce trade never really left. The Cookstown name is known across Ulster as a bacon and sausage brand.
Halfway along the street the Church of the Holy Trinity dominates everything around it. J.J. McCarthy built it between 1855 and 1860; he was the leading Gothic Revival church architect in Ireland, sometimes called the Irish Pugin, and the tower and spire at its east end are the tallest thing for some way. The older foundation is St Luran's, the Church of Ireland parish of Derryloran, whose seventeenth-century graveyard survives out on Sandholes Road.
The walking is mostly out of town. Four miles southwest, Wellbrook Beetling Mill sits in a wooded glen on the Ballinderry River — the last working water-powered beetling mill in Northern Ireland, with a sixteen-foot wheel, open weekends in July and August for guided tours. Beetling was the last stage of linen finishing, and Cookstown was the principal linen centre west of the Bann; Gunning's mill once ran over three hundred looms, and flax was spun, woven, bleached and beetled here until 1956. A mile southeast, the Killymoon demesne runs along the same river around John Nash's Regency-Gothic castle of 1803, now the clubhouse of an eighteen-hole golf course. Five miles out on the Omagh road, Drum Manor Forest Park has an arboretum, a walled butterfly garden, a Japanese garden and two lakes, with a playground and campsite for a full day.
Further afield the country turns prehistoric and political. Beaghmore, eight miles into the Sperrins, has seven Bronze Age stone circles, ten stone rows and twelve cairns, dug out of the peat in the 1930s. Just south is Tullaghoge Fort, the hilltop rath where the O'Neill chiefs of Tyrone were inaugurated until Lord Mountjoy smashed the stone coronation chair in 1602. Ten miles east on the shore of Lough Neagh, the Ardboe High Cross rises eighteen feet with twenty-two carved biblical panels.
The town has no working railway now, though it once had two; the A505 runs west to Omagh, buses reach Belfast forty-seven miles away, and you will want a car. Every April the Cookstown 100 takes over, Ireland's longest-running motorcycle road race and the traditional start of the season. In the centre the Burnavon arts centre, built in 2000 on the site of the old town hall, keeps a theatre and gallery going year-round.
Jonathan Swift is said to have written part of Gulliver's Travels while staying at Loughry Manor, on the edge of town. The twice-weekly markets Charles I granted in 1628 still trade.