tullaghoge

Probably an Iron Age sanctuary originally, this was later to become the inauguration place of the O'Neill chieftains of Tyrone. Here at the clan seat of O'Hagan, hereditary stewards to the O'Neills, the ceremony was conducted in the presence of the assembled under-chiefs, with the recipient installed in an ancient stone chair said to have been blessed by St. Patrick. The Great Hugh O'Neill was himself thus enthroned at Tullaghoge in 1593. That the inauguration chair, a rough construction of stone slabs, was in existence as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century is known from a contemporary map which depicts the chair on the hill below the fort; this accords with an account of it having been broken on the orders of Lord Mountjoy in 1602, a year before the collapse of the earldom of Tyrone.

The fort, one of the last important clan seats of Gaelic Ulster, is in essence a large bivallate rath. It commands the summit of a rounded hill, 2 miles south-south-east of Cookstown, to the east of the Stewartstown road.