Country Living with Francis Farragher

A couple of weeks back, a few of us took on an annual expedition to see one of Galway footballers’ away league matches and on the basis that ‘no journey could be long enough’ we made our way to Derry on a pleasant February Saturday morning.

Derry, a bit like Galway, is a very friendly and welcoming city and thankfully the trip to ‘the North’ is now a seamless affair – you only notice that you’ve crossed the border when you see the different road signs and the filling stations advertising the price of fuel in sterling.

There is a real dividend from peace and now Derry is a huge tourist attraction with tens of thousands visiting the second biggest city in Ulster each year where areas like the Creggan, Bogside and Waterside can be strolled through quite peacefully and pleasantly.

Back in the early 1990s in far more troubled times in Derry, one Martin McCrossan – affectionately known as ‘Mr Derry’ – started walking tours in the city as a tourism promotion initiative.

At the time, if there were gold medals for optimism, he’d have easily won one, as selling Ulster tourism in that era was no easy task, but oh, how all that has changed.

Sadly, Martin McCrossan passed away in 2015 at the age of 53, but by then his tours were an integral part of the Derry tourism scene and his walking tours of the ‘The Walls’ are now etched into the landscape of the city.

Times though have changed for the better, as we discovered in our ‘walk on the walls’ with guide Sorcha Bonner, as she took us to our highest point on the stone structure which affords a fantastic view of the city.

Now, during the peak tourist season, hundreds and at times thousands of people enjoy this view every day, but in that awful period through the 1970s, it was inaccessible to the public, with the British Army even making the high point higher with a watch tower, which was intimidating to say the least.

The tour traces the bad times and now thankfully the better days that the city enjoys but of course what always sticks in the mind when it comes to Derry is the date of, Sunday, January 30th, 1972 when 14 innocent civilians were murdered by members of the British Army parachute regiment, on one of the worst atrocities in the history of The Troubles.

As our guide pointed out, when the British Army first came to Derry in August 1969 , they were given quite a cordial welcome by the Catholic population of the city, who saw them initially as being ‘an improvement’ on what they believed, with some justification, was a sectarian RUC police force. The British Army’s honeymoon period was a very short one indeed.

Pictured: The old and the new . . . as children sit and play on one of the 17th century cannons that still adorn the battlements along the old Derry Walls.