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Where Market Square Dundalk Louth Contact T: +353 42 9352111 E: info@dundalktouristoffice.ie Visit Website Location Dundalk Tourist Information Office, occupies a prominent position in the Market Square. Opening Hours The Tourist office is open all year round, Monday to Friday from 09.00 to 17.00 hours Services include: Accommodation booking service, Itinerary and route planning, Local and national information, Map sales, What's on, in the area and nationally etc. Visit Dundalk Tourist Office Facebook page

Where Station House Carlingford Louth Contact T: +353 42 9373650 E: tourism@carlingfordheritagecentre.com Visit Website Location Carlingford Tourist Information Office is located in the Station House, Fair Green, Carlingford. This service is managed by Carlingford Lough Heritage Trust. Opening Hours Monday - Friday: 10:00 am to 5:00 pm Saturday, Sunday: 11.00 am to 4:00 pm Services Include General tourism information, Local literature, Maps & Guides, Remote Working Hub, Guided tours of medieval Carlingford.

Where Millmount Terrace Millmount Drogheda Louth Image Gallery Millmount Terrace sign map Millmount How has the fort at Millmount changed over the last 800 years? The flat-topped mound known as Millmount still stands out in the townscape of Drogheda, due to its high position and monumental scale. It has the aura of a neolithic tumulus, although there is no evidence that it is a prehistoric structure. It is a focus of Irish mythology, for Amhairgin (pronounced Aver-gin), a Milesian poet, who is celebrated as the inventor of song and poetry, is reputed to be buried here. The Song of Amhairgin has come down to us. Here is the beginning, as translated by Lady Gregory: I am the wind on the sea; I am the wave of the sea; I am the bull of the seven battles; I am the eagle on the rock. What we see today is a motte (mound), originally constructed with a bailey (enclosure), probably by Hugh de Lacy before 1186. Strategically important to the Anglo-Normans, King John took it over in 1217. However, exceptionally for a major civic fort, the motte and bailey were not replaced by a stone castle. Instead, a circular stone keep was constructed on the summit of the motte. By the 1520s the importance of the keep to the crown had diminished and it was granted to Drogheda Corporation. It played a pivotal role in the sieges of 1641–2 and 1649. It was passed back to the government in 1702. For the next two hundred years Millmount became an army base, accumulating structures to support a resident soldiery. A U-shape barracks was built against the town wall below the motte in the early eighteenth century. The Martello tower (which survives), accommodating a magazine, gunners’ store and soldiers’ quarters, was constructed on the summit in 1808. Other buildings were added in the nineteenth century; officers’ quarters, governors’ house, canteen and armoury, guard house and entrance. On the 4 April 1922, after the British army had left, the fort was taken over by republican anti-treaty forces. The last military engagement at Millmount occurred three months later when the Free State army shelled the fort with an 18-pounder field gun from across the river. The tower was damaged and the republican soldiers withdrew. In 2000, Millmount was restored as a cultural centre, housing Drogheda Museum.

Where Pitcher Hill Barrack Street-Pitcher Hill Steps Drogheda Louth Naming a place The Anglo-Norman name, Novus Pons or ‘New Bridge’, distinguished it from Vetus Pons or Old Bridge further up the river, now spelled Oldbridge. The name Droichead Átha predates the Anglo-Norman arrival and translates as ‘bridge of the ford’. It may have originally referred to Oldbridge which was located at the tidal limits of the River Boyne where the river could be bridged and forded at low tide. (Oldbridge is now located (in current maps) – at the site of the Battle of the Boyne to the east of Drogheda town) Drogheda was referred to as Tredagh in the early modern period; Barnabe Goche described his map as a ‘plott of the town of Tredagh’ in 1574; Gerard Boate referred to Drogheda as Tredagh in Ireland’s Natural History, written in 1645, published in Dublin in 1726. The name ‘Drogheda’ was also used from the early years of the history of the town. The recorded spelling varied; Drocheda in 1203, Drohheda in 1212, Droghed in 1215, Droheda in 1217 and, in 1336, its modern spelling.

Where The Bull Ring James Street Drogheda Louth Image Gallery The Bull Ring sign map Governance An extraordinary parliamentary sitting in 1494 is reputed to have been located in the stone castle that was located at the Bull Ring, which had been the Tholsel of the south borough prior to unification of Drogheda in 1412. It was at this sitting that Poynings’ Law was enacted. This law aimed to restrict the autonomy of the Lords Deputy in Ireland and worked to ensure the subordinate position of the kingdom of Ireland until 1782. Cromwell in Drogheda Adversaries Oliver Cromwell arrived in Ireland at the head of the parliamentary army in August 1649. His aim was to defeat surviving royalist resistance to the English parliamentarians in Ireland. In January 1649 Irish royalists had come to terms with the Catholic confederates so that there was a royalist-confederate garrison in Drogheda. The garrison was commanded by the Catholic Sir Arthur Aston, and composed of Irish and English, Catholics and Protestants. The size of the resistance force is still debated. Siege and massacre On 11 September Cromwell established a large force and several large cannons in the area of what is now known as Cromwell’s Mount to the south east of Drogheda. He pounded the walls to the east and south of St Mary’s Church for three days until he made two breaches and called on the garrison to surrender. They refused, forfeiting the right to be spared if the attackers took the garrison by assault. After fierce fighting at the breaches, Cromwell’s army surged into the town and the garrison fled, some seeking refuge in the steeple of St Peter’s Church, others running to the towers set in the town walls. Some of the remaining garrison retreated to Millmount with Sir Arthur Aston. Cromwell’s troops gave no quarter, brutally killing nearly all the soldiers they could find. They sent the heads of 16 royalist officers to Dublin to be displayed on the approach roads to the city. Cromwell reported that the soldiers killed ‘many inhabitants’; the actual number is unknown. It was a ferociously bloody massacre, even by the standards of the time. It is indelibly printed on the collective memory.

Where South Quay Corner St. Mary's Bridge Drogheda Louth Image Gallery South Quay sign map How the port of Drogheda grew There were a number of physical impediments associated with the River Boyne at Drogheda that impacted on the operation of the port. This was pointed out by Gerard Boate in 1652: the port is ‘very troublesome to be got into … a bar lying across its mouth, over which vessels cannot pass but at high water, but also very narrow in the mouth.’ The quays, though, were impressive. Sir William Brereton in 1635 wrote; ‘This river is built on both sides, and there is on either side a convenient quay and stone wall built all along the river, so as a ship may be close unto this quay, and many unload upon her.’ In the seventeenth century Drogheda sustained a good trade exporting wool, linen, hides and provisions to British ports as well as to Cadiz, Rotterdam, Nantes and the Canaries. Improvements to the river channel, the quays and the management of the port were slowly realized in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With the widening and extending of the quays, the building of the custom house (c.1749; demolished in the 1960s) and mayoralty house (built by 1759; still to be seen) on The Mall, the dredging of the river, and the reclamation of slob lands to the east of The Mall for new development sites, Drogheda expanded commercially. Arthur Young found Drogheda busy in 1776; ‘July 20th, to Drogheda, a well-built town, active in trade, the Boyne bringing ships to it. It was market day, and I found the quantity of corn, etc., and the number of people assembled very great; few country markets in England more thronged.’ By the 1840s the quays presented a spacious place where people could congregate; Daniel O’Connell addressed a large crowd there in 1841; 43 years later people crowded the quays to hear Charles Stewart Parnell. Large rubble stone stores and mills were built in the area to the north of the quays, many of which survive today.

Where North Quay Corner St. Mary's Bridge - Shop Street Drogheda Louth The making of the River Boyne The mythical goddess Boann brought the Boyne into being by walking anti-clockwise around the Well of Wisdom. The waters rose up with great force catching Boann, who drowned. The river was named in her honour. How the Boyne begat a hero In Irish mythology the hazel tree was the fount of all knowledge. This was transferred to a salmon swimming in the Well of Wisdom when he ate the hazel nuts that fell from the nine surrounding hazel trees. It was prophesied that a man called Fionn would eat the salmon and gain this knowledge. How Fionn mac Cumhaill gained his powers on the banks of the River Boyne The poet Finnegas caught the Salmon of Knowledge. But it was his apprentice Deimne Maol who acquired its mythical powers, by accidentally tasting the salmon, having burnt his thumb and put it into his mouth to sooth the pain while preparing the fish. His real name was Fionn. Fionn mac Cumhaill became the great leader of the Fianna.

Where St. Augustine's Church Shop Street Drogheda Louth Art and a garden If you descend Shop Street or medieval Rosemary Lane, first recorded in 1698, you arrive at St Augustine’s Church, a thriving Victorian church of many treasures. Inside, you will find the intricate and idiosyncratic stained glass of the Harry Clarke Studio. To the side of the building, an adjoining yard has been transformed into a tranquil garden oasis; the Augustinian Garden of Remembrance.

Where West Gate Corner West Street Drogheda Louth Image Gallery West Gate sign map West Gate, recorded as being in existence by c.1206, faced St Laurence’s Gate on the main east-west axis of Drogheda. Newcomen represented it in 1657 as being like St Laurence’s Gate, with an arched entrance flanked by tall, square, battlemented towers. Permission to demolish West Gate was given in 1789, and it was no longer standing by 1810. Congestion at West Gate in 1771 “Consideration being had of the very great inconvenience to the Publick by the Throng of Cattle and Carriages at the West Gate of this Town on Markett and Fair days by which passengers are stop’t and obstructed from coming into and going out of the same to their great danger delay and detriment It is ordered that Mr Mayor the sheriffs auditors & viewers or the majority of them do consider in what manner a publick gate may be made at the West end of Fair Street through the Town Wall to the Turnpike Road leading to Dunleer” (Council Book of the Drogheda Corporation)

Where West Street & West Gate Barlow House Drogheda Louth Image Gallery West Street and West Gate sign map Barlow House How a generation reshaped Drogheda West Street Although Drogheda had suffered during the sieges of 1641–2 and Cromwell’s siege of 1649, by the early eighteenth century the town impressed visitors such as the political commentator William Molyneux. He found it to be in ‘every way like Dublin, than any I have seen in Ireland’. Economic prosperity translated into fine houses, one of the finest being that constructed by Alderman James Barlow in c.1734. An engraving of Barlow House appeared on Joseph Ravell’s 1749 map of Drogheda, along with six other impressive houses. Four of these were new classical houses with parapets, centrally placed entrances accessed by a short flight of steps, and symmetrically arranged windows. Mr Shepard’s house (later owned by the Ogle family) on Fair Street survives, much altered, but Lord Chief Justice Singleton’s house, and the neighbouring schoolmaster’s house in St Laurence Street are now both gone. Barlow’s House still addresses West Street with the same elegance as it did in the early eighteenth century. West Gate An engraving of Barlow House appeared on Joseph Ravell’s 1749 map of Drogheda, Ravell’s map shows Barlow’s extensive formal garden that ran inside the west town wall down to the River Boyne. It was not the only garden bordering the river. The father of Barlow’s wife, Alderman Francis Leigh, had an older gabled house with a steeply pitched roof and garden beside the river. This house too was important enough to be shown on Ravell’s map. Placed inside the town wall at the end of The Mall on the eastern end of the town, it hindered the expansion of the north quays, until it was demolished in 1780. Barlow House is the finest Palladian house to remain in Drogheda. How did it survive? By finding new uses. By the late nineteenth century it was a constabulary barracks – West Gate Barracks. With the formation of the Free State in 1922 it was converted to a Garda barracks. It was restored and reopened as the Droichead Arts Centre in 2003.

Where Old Abbey Lane Top of Fr. Connolly Way Drogheda Louth Image Gallery Old Abbey Lane (top of Fr Connolly Way) sign map How Drogheda began Within about 50 years of Drogheda’s foundation (on either side of the Boyne) the process of building a wall to define and defend the town had begun, with the first recorded murage grant dating to 1234. The walls were largely in place by the end of the 1200s. A number of religious foundations came to Drogheda in the thirteenth century; the Dominicans (founded 1224), Franciscans (founded c.1240), Augustinians (founded post-1272). Early industrial activity was connected to building – quarrying and lime manufacture and also ship building and repair. Milling was soon established, with a royal licence dated 1208 granted to Walter de Lacy to erect a mill. Pottery was manufactured by the early inhabitants. By the end of the thirteenth century Drogheda was established as a port for the export of produce from the lands of Meath and as a strategic base between Dublin and Ulster. Hugh de Lacy, the Anglo-Norman installed in 1172 as Henry II’s deputy in Ireland, saw the potential of the site at Drogheda. The lowest crossing point of the River Boyne, it was the place to establish a port and coastal communication with Dublin. The south side with its steep escarpment was naturally defensive, while the north side was suitable for more extensive urban development. Drogheda began as two towns. As the area to the north of the river lay in the diocese of Armagh and that to the south in the diocese of Meath, there were two parishes, for each of which a church was founded: St Peter’s and St Mary’s. Two administrative areas developed, each with a market cross and Tholsel. The basic street pattern emerged in tandem with the granting of development plots, the earliest grants dating to c.1185.

Where Old Abbey Lane Drogheda Louth Medieval Augustinian friary (The Old Abbey) In Drogheda, friars belonging to the Dominican, Augustinian and Franciscan orders set up monasteries within the medieval walls. The Dominicans, established on high ground to the north (of which the Magdalene Tower survives), and the Franciscans, prominently situated at the east end of the main quay (north of The Mall, on the site now occupied by Highlanes Gallery) were the wealthiest orders at that time. Little is known about the medieval Augustinians. Documentary evidence strongly suggests that they founded their monastery near the West Gate in the late thirteenth century. After the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1540s the monastery buildings fell into ruin. Elements of the church, and most prominently, the church tower, built in the late 1400s, survive today.