Victoria Street,
Lurgan.
Opening Hours
•Monday to Sunday
•Summer Hours - 8.00am to 10.00pm from the 1st April to 30th September
•Winter Hours - 8.00am to Dusk from the 1st October to the 31st March

Around 1800 the Brownlow landlord family made a gift to the catholics of Lurgan of a mill-warehouse which stood on a rise a little distance from the Dougher stream, now piped, and which flows at the bottom of the greatly treasured Dougher graveyard. At this time, the Catholic population of Shankill Parish was almost entirely rural, concentrated in the townlands a little distant from town.

With the population of Ireland as a whole, and County Armagh in particular, undergoing rapid expansion, the converted church-warehouse in Dougher became too small to cater for Catholic parishioners. And then, most likely acknowledgement that the long-awaited Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had come to pass, the Brownlow’s donated the Dougher field which surrounded the primitive chapel to the Catholic people as a graveyard, and an elevated site in North Street, Lurgan, for the erection of a proper church. In 1830-31, the Reverend William O'Brien, from the Broadwater area of Aghalee, began the building of the first St Peter's Church on the site.

You can read the History of The Dougher Cemetery by Jim McIllmurry HERE.

The inscription engraved on the plinth of a tall cross in the Dougher cemetery reads:-

This Cross marks the site of the Altar of the old Parish Church of Shankill, and was solemnly blessed and indulgenced at the end of the Mission given by the Passionist Fathers in June 1877.

Our thanks to Frank McCorry for this information.