Caledon Mansion

• The village of Caledon is named after the Earls of Caledon and is a designated conservation area. Their mansion designed by Thomas Cooley (1779) and enlarged by John Nash (1810), is the fourth great house to be built here. It has a beautiful Regency drawing room and library and the fourth earl kept black bears in the park. His third son, born in 1891, was Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis. On the estate is the ruin of a strange folly made out of the knuckle bones of cattle. It was built in the eighteenth century by Lord Orrery who hoped, he said to 'strike the Caledonians with wonder and amazement'. The butchers and tanners of Tyrone supplied the bones, though their opinions of the 'bone house' do not appear to have been recorded.
  The village is situated in the Clogher Valley and is of great architectural and historical interest.

· The estate was purchased in 1766 by James Alexander the 1st Earl of Caledon for £96,400 from the 7th Earl of Cork and Orerry, whose father acquired the property when he married into the Hamilton family.

I believe the notes above, from a BBC website, are inaccurate. The estates of Callidon were granted by Charles II in recognition of services to the royal cause and in payment of monies owed to his brother John, who was killed in the King's service, to Captain William Hamilton in about 1680 (see Chap II and III). They were inherited by his son, John Hamilton. He in turn had a son who died without issue and the estates passed to his daughter Margaret, who married the 6^th Earl of Cork and Orrery. The name mutated to Caledon in the eighteenth century. The 1^st Earl of Caledon, James Alexander, was born in 1736, went to India with the East India Company at age 23 and returned twenty years later a very wealthy man to buy Callidon (and probably his Earldom!). It therefore seems that James Alexander chose the village/estate name for his Earldom, probably on his elevation, rather than the other way round! C.F.B.H.