JOURNEYING from the Giant’s Causeway to Belfast and Dublin, through the north-eastern counties of Antrim and Down, one comes upon a region little known to the casual traveller, who is usually smitten at once with the charms of Killarney and the South, and who neglects this more conveniently and comfortably traversed region.
Truth to tell, the large centres of population of Dublin and Belfast, and sundry visitors from the “Midlands” of England, have appropriated it as their own playground, and, “in the season,” are found here in large numbers.
This need be no detraction from the charms of the region, which, if not historically and picturesquely possessed of the same qualities as the middle and south of Ireland, at least has the advantage of being an unworn road to the majority of travellers.
Drogheda, on the estuary of the river Boyne, is the first happy hunting-ground for the student of history and architecture, after he leaves the immediate environs of Dublin itself.
Drogheda is at once ancient and modern. Its shops and factories, its shipping and its tramways, are evidences of that modernity which is ever obtrusive in an old-world shrine of history.
Drogheda, according to one authority, was formerly called Tredagh, and originally Imbbar Colpa. “It is so very ancient that it is supposed to have been founded by Heremon, one of the sons of Milesius, who, having arrived from Spain with Heber and his other brothers at Imbbar Sceine (Bantry Bay), was subsequently separated from Heber by a storm, and, while Heber regained the Kerry coast, Heremon, after innumerable hardships, put into Drogheda, where he effected a landing, but with the loss of his brothers and Colpa, the swordsman, who perished in the bay, and from which circumstance the town derived its name.” Thus writes Anthony Marmion, in his “History of the Maritime Ports of Ireland.” “There can be no doubt,” he continues, “that an eastern colony of Mithraic, or sun-worshippers, had been early established in the neighbourhood of Drogheda.” Coming, however, to less remote and fabulous happenings, Drogheda, whose Irish name was Droiceheadatha, the Bridge of the Ford, was taken by Turgesius the Dane in 911, and made a stronghold for raids into the surrounding country. Its importance was also recognized by the Anglo-Normans, who built a bridge across the Boyne at this point. The most celebrated military event in the town’s history was its siege and capture by Cromwell in 1649.
The walls and gates, so unusual in Ireland, were formerly a line of defence a mile and a half or more in circumference, and, from the very substantial remains of the St. Laurence Gate and the West or Butler Gate, it may be inferred that they were a wonderfully effective defence, sharing with the walls of Derry the glory of being the most elaborate works of their kind in Ireland.
The most curious architectural embellishment of Drogheda is the famous Magdalen steeple—all that remains of the Dominican Abbey founded in 1224 by the Archbishop of Armagh, whose remains lie buried in the ruins.
Here, in 1395, Richard II. of England held court, and within the building four Irish princes did homage to the king, and were knighted by him. Cromwell’s cannon razed the building until only the grim, gaunt tower or steeple was left. A sepulchral cairn of stone, known as the Mill Mount, appears to have been the ancient citadel of Drogheda. A mythical hero of the prechristian era, “Ghoban the Smith,” is supposed to have been buried here.
North of the Boyne estuary is Dundalk Bay, in itself a beautifully disposed body of water which, if not possessed of the ruggedness of the fiords of Western Ireland, is in every way an attractive setting for Dundalk itself, which is mostly a town of one long vertebrate street along which short spines radiate for a brief distance and lose themselves in the background of hills or in the strand of the sea.