Maghery & Saint Patrick’s Trail

 

Maghery is a village situated in a townland of the same name on the southwest shore of Lough Neagh in the parish of Tartaraghan. The name Maghery comes from the Irish (An Machaire) which means ‘the plain’. It had an earlier name (Machaire Grainin) which means the ‘plain of the little sandy place’.

The earliest reference to a church in Maghery is in a papal letter of 1322 which designated Maghery as church lands. The church was shown as roofless on a 1609 map of the Barony of Oneiland. The lands were granted to Sir Toby Caulfield and Maghery, along with Eglish, were still church lands in the 19th century as they were tithe free.

 In the Maghery area there is a tradition of an ancient road between Armagh and Coney Island, known as St Patrick’s Trail, which in the past facilitated travel through Armagh to the north and south of the country. Various stretches of this trail have been located in the neighbouring townland of Derrylileagh.  It was constructed with oak planks laid side by side overlaid with paving stones and was thought to have linked the Monastery of Peter and Paul in Armagh with an outlying monastery in Maghery. St Patrick is thought to have used it on his travels. The parish name of Tartaraghan is thought to come from Tireachan, who was a biographer of St Patrick.