A living record of Ulster's old farm breeds
Tannaghmore sits in the quiet countryside on the edge of Lurgan, between the town and the Craigavon Lakes, on land that was once a working farm. Today it's kept by Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon Borough Council as two things in one: a rare-breeds animal farm and a set of formal walled gardens, both open to the public and both free.
The farm's purpose is quietly serious. The breeds it keeps — Irish Moiled and Dexter cattle, Galway sheep, Saddleback pigs and old lines of poultry — are the animals that would have been common on an Ulster farm a hundred years ago, before modern commercial breeds pushed them to the edge of extinction. Several are on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust's watch lists, and Tannaghmore is said to be the only RBST approved farm park in Ireland. Meeting them is a small history lesson wrapped in a good day out: children get right up to the fence, and the animals — pointedly not exotic — are the ordinary ones their great-grandparents would have known.
Beside the pens, the walled gardens give the place its calmer half — clipped hedges and formal beds, a maze for the children, and a trail of willow and tree sculptures dotted through the grounds. Add the wooden play park, the picnic tables and the BBQ spots, and it turns from a quick animal visit into a proper afternoon. It's the kind of place a family drifts back to through the year, precisely because it costs nothing and never feels like it's trying too hard.