NORTHERN LIGHTS

The Sperrin Mountains are as off-grid as Northern Ireland gets — an ancient, storied landscape of stone circles, dark skies and literary trails rising from the emerald pastures between Derry and Belfast. A meandering road trip through this lesser-visited swathe of mid-Ulster offers the ultimate rural escape — and myriad ways to connect with the land

- PÓLÓ CONGHAILE

THE FIRST THING THAT STRIKES ME IS THE SILENCE.

Driving from Dublin to Davagh has been a journey from city to villages, motorways to country roads, from four bars of phone reception to — depending on the hollow I’m entering — zero bars. A hen harrier floats over an old shed with a rusting, corrugated roof, and when I park my car in a forest in the thick of County Tyrone, the door shuts with a beautifully muffled thump. It feels like audio made in a recording studio.

The pines and spruce and mosses and blanket bog here, together with the bowl-shaped depression in which Davagh Forest Park sits, all seem to contribute to this unearthly soundscape. When I point it out to Seán Clarke, a farmer and part-time guide I’ve arranged to meet for a walk through the trees and the forest’s archaeological treasures, he smiles.

“You can hear someone hammering a fence post for a mile here, or the cry of a calf or a lamb,” he says. And, after a pause: “For an unusually long distance, you know.”

This bowl scooped out of the landscape (Davagh means ‘cauldron’) blocks out something else, too. ‘Sky glow’ is a term I learn at OM Dark Sky Observatory, newly opened in a forest clearing here. It refers to light pollution, and displays inside explain why this remote area, secreted away in Northern Ireland’s Sperrin Mountains, recently became the world’s 78th International Dark Sky Park. “The 77th was in the Grand Canyon,” guide Erin Lennox tells me proudly. There’s an image of the planet Saturn on her name pin.