Where lies the heart of Omagh’s nocturnal hum?

“I didn’t hear it until I started listening out for it, and now I cannot un-hear it,” said Bernie, a resident of Brookmount Heights, after I knocked her door on Wednesday morning to enquire about the mysterious hum that has been reverberating across Omagh for the last few weeks.

Battling a dose in her chest – and one on her doorstep – the forbearing women explained that she had first been informed of the strange sound by her neighbour, and that she has since seen that original description of the noise repeated and corroborated by hundreds of other local people on social media.

“Everyone seemed to be hearing it, but it was only the other night that I noticed it for the first time.

“It sounds electrical, like a generator or transformer, not very loud, but constant,” she said.

The night before I went on this door-knocking mission, I had tried to follow the sound to its source, letting the volume of the hum tell me whether I was getting warmer or colder.

Touring around residential areas that were said to be the worst affected – such as the Brookmount Road, Tamlaght Road, Kevlin Road and Coolnagard – I turned off the ignition, stepped out of the van, and listened closely to the night.

I could hear the hum fairly evenly wherever I went.

It sounded, to me, like the murmer of far-off machinery.

Then, I took a nip out to Doogary Industrial Estate, where one of our readers strongly alleged the source of the sound could be found.

There was no doubt that outside one factory, a moderately-loud industrial groan could be heard.

However, whether such a sound could travel so uniformly across the whole town, I had my doubts.

5G towers, telephone pylons, newly-installed gasworks, snoring lorries; there are any number of competing theories being offered to explain this mystery, but, to me, none seem to have much substance.

Thankfully, Fermanagh and Omagh District Council has promised to investigate the disconcerting sound, qualifying their good news, however, with the caveat that ‘given the vague nature of the complaint, and alleged extent of the noise across a number of locations in Omagh, it may take some time to locate the exact source/sources of the noise’.

One woman who is likely to be unhappy with the unconfident tone struck by the council’s commitment is Jennifer Clarke – the sleep-deprived neighbour of Bernie from Brookmount.

Jennifer said that she cannot recall exactly when she first heard the noise, but said that, much like the tick of a clock, once she became aware of it, it became impossible to ignore.

“I was waking out of my sleep in the middle of the night in a way that I never usually would. I could not work out what was going on, and then I heard it, clear as day.”

Jennifer believes that, since it began, the hum has been an ever-present feature of the soundscape of Omagh, but one that is revealed – or concealed – by the rest of the town’s noise.

“As darkness falls, I hear it start, and the later into the night it gets, the louder it seems to become.

“But I think it is there all the time, and that it is only as the normal daytime noise in the town builds that it seems to go away.

“I wish they would find out what it is, because it’s driving me mad.”