From linen mill to shopping village
Moygashel had been a linen place long before the shops arrived. Families here were spinning and weaving flax back in the 1600s, and the mills proper are said to date from the 1780s, when a Quaker named Thomas Boardman laid out a bleach green and, a few years later, a mill with a small dye works. For the best part of two centuries this corner of Tyrone lived and breathed linen.
The buildings you walk round today mostly go back to Robert Stevenson, who rebuilt the mill in 1876 after a fire, adding weaving and beetling sheds and rows of houses for the workers — a whole community of beetlers, winders and carters grew up around the factory. Moygashel linen earned a name for quality, and the mills are said to have turned their hands to the war effort in both World Wars, making hard-wearing cloth for the military, from parachute straps to gun covers.
Linen finally gave way late in the twentieth century, and rather than let the mill go, the local community development association reworked it — the site reopened around 2000 as a village-style outlet, said to be the first of its kind in Ireland. They kept the bones of the place: the red brick, the tall windows, the roof trusses you can still see over your head in The Loft, and the old block names — the Cloth Loft, the Weaving Shed, the Dye House, the Frame House. A small exhibition of mill photographs, tools and machinery tells the fuller story.
That's really why it earns a spot on a days-out map. It's not the biggest shopping trip you'll ever take, and it won't be the cheapest — but it's a genuinely pleasant hour or two, browsing good little shops and drinking decent coffee inside a piece of Tyrone's working history that somebody bothered to save.