Tomney's Bar, Moy — claims 1765

The claim

A small bar on the tree-lined square at Moy, with stained glass at the front and a warren of little rooms behind it: a public bar refitted in 1946, a parlour, a room with a chandelier and a lounge shaped like a railway carriage. The square was laid out for Lord Charlemont in the eighteenth century and held the Moy horse fair. Music from Thursday to Sunday, and a yard at the back.

What the records show

The 1765 is not on the bar's own website, which says only that it is one of the oldest pubs in Ireland. The year is published in Mid Ulster District Council's business directory, in a sentence that otherwise repeats the pub's own words, so we read it as the house's claim at second hand; the Belfast Telegraph and Belfast Live have used it too, on sites we cannot read. No licence, deed or directory entry for 1765 has been traced, and no record of drink sold here earlier than the twentieth century. The chapter on the bar in Pubs of the North, reprinted by Beer Bore, has it at least three hundred years old on the evidence of a photograph hanging inside, and dates the last big refit to 1946. The Department for Communities lists the house at grade B2 and records both its former and its present use as a public house, without dating the fabric; the houses round the square at Moy are mostly mid eighteenth century, which is consistent with 1765 and is not a record of a bar. The register was read again on 18 September 2026, in the Department's own map data, last edited on 10 September 2026, and two things came of it. The statutory address spells the house Tamney's rather than Tomney's — entry HB13/08/010, grade B2, Tamney's Public House, 9-10 The Square, also called the Diamond — with the date of construction left empty. Every one of the thirty-four entries within a hundred and twenty metres of the bar has that field empty, while nine of the ten entries the same layer holds around the River Inn in Derry, read in the same hour, carry a construction range: the blank is how Moy was surveyed and not a fault in the reading. The square is well listed around it — the Village Bar at 24-25 and Ye Olde Oak Bar at 19 and 21 Killyman Street are grade B2 and B, the Sly Fox at 7 Killyman Street is grade B and was a house before it was a bar, and only St James's church on the Diamond is grade A. What does carry a date is the settlement: the Sites and Monuments Record holds Moy itself as a historic settlement of the seventeenth century, entry TYR062:015, the century before the bar's claimed 1765, and it says nothing about a licence. The industrial heritage, archaeological potential and significant archaeological interest layers hold nothing within a hundred and fifty metres of the bar, and the same query at the same radius returned the settlement record, which is the control on those three absences. Open: the Food Standards Agency inspected it on 15 October 2025, and the Tyrone Courier reported on 13 September 2024 that the council had approved a licensed garden room behind it.

What to look for inside

Grade B2 in the Northern Ireland register, which records it as a public house
A public bar last refitted in 1946, with a semi-circular mirror in red and black
A licensed garden room for the yard approved by the council in 2024

Visiting

Tomney's Bar is in Moy, Northern Ireland, at 9-10 The Square, Moy, Dungannon BT71 7SG. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

tomneys.com Directions in your maps app