The Church of the Sacred Heart has twin spires, and you tend to see them before you see anything else of Omagh, rising over the town from above the river. Omagh sits where the Drumragh and Camowen meet to become the Strule, which flows on to the Mourne and then the Foyle, and the whole place is built around that confluence. It has flooded often enough over the years — 1909, 1929, 1954, 1969, 1987, 1999, 2007 — that flood walls now line the Strule, doubling as riverside paths through the centre of town.
This is a county town of around 20,000, the market and administrative hub for a wide stretch of west Tyrone, and it is better provisioned than its rural setting might suggest. More than £80 million went into retail here between 2000 and 2003, and the shopping spreads across the Great Northern Road and Showgrounds retail parks as well as the high street. Whatever the hinterland needs, it comes to Omagh for.
The walking is to the north. The Sperrin Mountains begin more or less at the edge of town, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty of rounded summits, moorland and blanket bog, topped by Sawel at 678 metres. They hold red fox, pine marten, peregrine and buzzard, and are among the last refuges of red grouse in Northern Ireland. About ten miles up, near Gortin, Gortin Glen Forest Park runs a forest drive and waymarked trails through the Owenkillew valley, where sika deer live in the wider range. Closer in, Grange Park is the largest green space, and the 27-acre Omagh Leisure Complex adds a boating pond, astroturf and cycle paths.
Gaelic games matter here. Omagh St Enda's play at Healy Park, which holds close to 25,000 and was the first Gaelic-games ground in Ulster to fit floodlights. The Strule Arts Centre, built on a reclaimed riverbank, opened in 2007 with a theatre and gallery.
At the top of High Street stands the courthouse, completed in 1814 to John Hargrave's neoclassical design, its Tuscan portico carrying a pediment and a clock. The clock stopped in 2013 and was repaired in 2019.
The courthouse was the intended target of the car bomb of 15 August 1998, which the Real IRA left on Market Street, 365 yards short, because there was no closer parking. It killed 29 people and injured around 220, the deadliest single incident of the Troubles. A memorial garden stands about 300 metres from the site. A mirror in the park tracks the sun and directs its light through 31 smaller mirrors, each etched with a victim's name, onto a heart of crystal set in an obelisk where the bomb went off.
A few miles north on the A5 is the Ulster American Folk Park, an open-air museum of Irish emigration built around the cottage where Thomas Mellon was born before he left for Pittsburgh. There are more than thirty buildings, an Old World and a New World, and a full-size emigrant ship, the Brig Union, tied up at the dockside.
The playwright Brian Friel was born just outside the town at Knockmoyle, and the family moved to Killyclogher while he was still small. Jimmy Kennedy, who wrote "Teddy Bears' Picnic," was raised in the same country to the north.