Coalisland has also very good accessibility today as the roads are good to travel on. Coalisland is roughly 3miles off the M1 Motorway and is about 40miles from Belfast. Coalisland is South West of Lough Neagh and is about 5miles from Dungannon.
Coalisland Corn mill 1930 Coalisland Heritage Centre
Coalisland Canal in 2003
Dungannon
At one stage Dungannon was the Capital of Ireland in the early 1600’s due to Hugh O’ Neill being situated here. Dungannon is situated on top of a hill. The O’ Neills had built a castle on this hill as it acted as a good defence for the town. Dungannon was the main stronghold of the O’ Neills from the 14th Century until the Plantation of Ulster. All traces of the O’ Neills fort on the hill has gone but the name is recalled in The Fort Bar in Scotch street.
Dungannon used to be well known for being a market town, but now all of that has changed as it is now mainly a trading town. Dungannon has a population of 12,000 people. It contains many shops and services. It also has many entertainment venues, swimming pools, cinemas, pubs and bars not like in Coalisland.
Dungannon is also South West of Lough Neagh and is 5miles from Coalisland. Dungannon isn’t that far away from the M1 Motorway. This has increased the trading percentage in Dungannon by a lot and has influenced other department stores and industries to trade in here.
Dungannon had at one time, a linen industry but it has now been replaced by textile industries and glassworks. There are many popular industries in and out of Dungannon. For instance Tyrone Crystal attracts a lot of tourists into Dungannon. Another industry with is situated in Dungannon is Tyrone Brick. It first produced brick form the clay made in Coalisland.
Today in the town centre of Dungannon you would find many department stores and some convience stores. There are many jewellery shops, clothes shops, corner shops, hairdressers and restaurants in Dungannon. Dungannon is also the third largest town in County Tyrone.
This is the Castle Ruins today
On the following page you will see a map. It includes the location of my two study areas which are in Northern Ireland. My study areas are Dungannon and Coalisland.
Aims of my Coursework
The aim of my geography coursework is to study and investigate two local towns within Northern Ireland. These two towns are Dungannon and Coalisland. The main reason as to why I chose to study these two towns is because they are situated in my local area. I live in the town of Coalisland and it is where I go to school. Dungannon is the nearest large town where I would go to shop for clothes and other high order goods. During my piece of coursework I studied a very important topic. This topic was on settlement. In this topic you learn about settlement hierarchies i.e., some towns within a region will be of more importance due to the fact of it having a larger population and a greater number of shops and services in it. As a class we all have decided to base our investigation around the topic of settlement hierarchies and so we will compare Dungannon and Coalisland.
The aim of my coursework investigation is to prove that towns with a bigger population and surface area are higher up the settlement hierarchy. These towns will also have a wider range of shops and services. Towns like these will have a bigger sphere of influence than other towns.
In order to carry out this investigation, I have developed three hypotheses to help me do so.
They are as follows:
- Dungannon has a larger population and surface area than Coalisland.
- Dungannon is a more accessible shopping town than Coalisland.
- Dungannon has a larger sphere of influence than Coalisland.
Methodology
During class, having discussed the hypothesis for this coursework, we had to decide how we were going to collect the data and information that we needed in order to prove each hypothesis.
Some of the information which we need was as follows:
- Area size of each town.
- The distances people travelled to a shop.
- If the people came to buy high order or low order goods.
- Where the people lived and shopped in each of the towns.
- The population figures for each town.
- The method in which the people travelled.
- How often people shopped for high order and low order goods.
There was two main way in which I needed to collect the necessary information. The first main way was from primary sources. This is just were you personally, collect the information you need yourself in each town. The second main way was from secondary sources. This is just information you get like on the internet, which has been already collected for you. This kind of information is as what you can say as ‘second-hand’ information. You can get more secondary information from libraries, local newspapers, local council, tourist information, the population census for Northern Ireland and so on.
In order to gather the primary information our class decided on making a questionnaire for each of the towns. We also decided on carrying out a survey of the number of shops and services found in each of the towns.
The questions are as follows:
1. What is the name of the town or village where you live?
This question is asked to help us find out the towns sphere of influence.
2. How far did you travel to come here?
This was asked in our survey to help us calculate the actual sphere of influence of each of the towns telling us how far people are willing to ravel to a town for some low order goods such as bread and milk and also high order goods like furniture and clothes.
3. How did you travel here?
This question was asked because it lets us know how people travel and what ways of transport they would use most often.
4. Would you come to this town to only buy or use the following services?
This question tells you what people mostly tend to buy in each of the two towns. It tells you whether they use they town to shop for higher order or low order goods and this also shows the importance of the town.
- What are the three main goods/services you use this town for?
This again shows what each of the towns is mostly used for and it also can tell you which town would have better shops and services.
- Have you come here today for any particular reason?
………………………………………………………………………………
Again this question tells you what each of the towns is used for helping you to find out the importance of each of the towns.
Thursday the 25th of September was the day in which we decided to carry out our survey investigation. Thursday the 25th was the chosen date for when we were to carry out our investigation because Thursday was near the weekend. This meant that the town would be very busy as people would be out doing their weekly shopping and probably out sorting out their business. In Dungannon, every Thursday is a traditional flower market day, which would bring a lot of people into the town for grocery shopping etc.
We travelled into Dungannon by bus. We left our school at approximately 9.30am. Once we arrived in Dungannon we were put into groups of two. The first thing we did was take a survey of the number of shops and services in the town. We walked through the main shopping area of Dungannon called Market Square, making a tally of the shops and services as we past them. We then continued along some streets of the town.
These streets are as follows:
- Irish Street
- Church Street
- William Street
- John Street
- Thomas Street
- Scotch Street
There is a map included in my Geography coursework and these streets in which I have surveyed are located in this map of Dungannon.
The second main thing we done, was to go to our positions on the streets any carry out the investigation. These positions could be like Menarys, Boots chemist, Woolworths, Peacocks, Tesco’s, Birthdays and Sainsbury’s.
As a class we took a sample of 100 people. The reason for this was that we could easily change our results into percentages. Whilst carrying out our questionnaire we asked every third person as this is what you’re meant to do when doing a questionnaire to make your results more accurate.
During the afternoon we repeated the above process in Coalisland. The streets in which we did out questionnaire on are:
- Main Street
- The Square
- Dungannon Road
- Lineside
- Washingbay Road
- Barrack Street.
When we were carrying out the questionnaire we stood outside some shops such as Sulivans, The Jet, Spring Island, Mc Glinchey’s, Landis, Taxi service, The Charity Shop and so on.
Whilst doing our investigation in each town we took some sketches and some pictures, showing how our investigation looked in process.
“Dungannon has a larger surface area and population than Coalisland.”
In this hypothesis my class and I want to find out two pieces of information about each of the towns we are studying, Dungannon and Coalisland
These two pieces of information are:
- Population of each town.
- Area of each town.
The reason as to why I want this information is so that I can find out which of the two towns, Dungannon and Coalisland, will be further up the settlement hierarchy. I expect that for a town to be higher up the settlement hierarchy it would have to have a greater area and have a larger population than the other town. This would make it a more important town than the other. I expect that Dungannon would be higher up the settlement hierarchy as it would have far more shops and services in it, bringing a lot of people into the town whereas Coalisland would have fewer shops and services in it bringing less people into the town than in Dungannon.
This information can be collected from secondary sources i.e. from the internet, books and the local council.
I used a website called to help me obtain the information in which I need to find the population of each town. The website gives many statistics on local town, villages and cities that are in your area in Northern Ireland. A population census is also given within each of these towns. From this information I am able to observe the population for Dungannon and Coalisland in the 2001 census. The results are given as follows in the table below:
Population table for each town
I have displayed these population figures on a bar chart which is just below:
Interpretation of results
After observing the information from my bar chart you can clearly see that Dungannon obviously has a bigger population then Coalisland, by a large amount. Dungannon has a population of 11,139 people and Coalisland has a population of 4,917 people in the 2001 census.
Area of Dungannon and Coalisland
As a class we came to the conclusion that we would expect that a town with a larger population (Dungannon: 11,139), would have a larger area than a town with a smaller population (Coalisland: 4,917), because there will be more shops, offices and houses etc in that town.
Method
How to find out the area of each town
We needed to find out the actual surface area of Dungannon and Coalisland’s town centre. In order to do this we needed individual maps of each of the two towns. We obtained planning maps from the ‘Northern Ireland Planning Service’ in Omagh. These two maps are showing on pages ... and ... As you can see from the maps the boundary line it highlighted in a dark black line. The next step was to measure the area. To do this I got tracing paper and put it over the maps, I traced the boundary line and then placed it over a page with grid squares. After that I had to count the number of squares inside each of the boundary lines of each town. Using the scale on each map I was able to easily work out the area of each town centre. There calculations are given in the following tables.
Results for Coalisland Town Centre Results of Dungannon Town Centre
Scale – 1.5cm = 30metres
Each square = 30m x 30m = 900m2
Summary Table
Interpretation of my results
As you can see by observation Dungannon has a larger area than Coalisland. My bar chart also tells you that Dungannon has even more than twice the area of Coalisland. The reason as to why Dungannon has a larger area than Coalisland is that it has a larger population. Dungannon has a population of 11,139 people and Coalisland has a population of 4,917 people. With Dungannon having such a large population of 11,139 people, it would have to have a very large surface area to serve its people. This are would include places for car parks, housing, shops and other services which help to provide the towns people with what they may need.
This is exactly what I had expected and therefore it proved my hypothesis “Dungannon has a larger surface area and population than Coalisland” right.
