The great attraction is Carlingford Castle, one of King John’s Irish fortresses, erected in 1210 by De Courcy at the king’s bidding. Some ruined castles are interesting, some rather the reverse. Carlingford Castle belongs to the former class. The courtyard, with its walls eleven feet in thickness, and galleries fitted with recesses for archers at each loop-hole; the curious little secret chamber, which one may reach by climbing up a wall, and through a mass of tangled ivy; the spiral staircase winding up to an airy battlemented height; all these are as interesting as they are picturesque. Underground, there is a range of small, gloomy dungeons, hewn out of the solid rock, where many a gallant life must have been worn away in bitter agony and despair, seven centuries ago, in those times when chivalry and romance were inextricably mixed with brutality. Just above the dungeon-cells runs the ruined stone terrace, looking out to sea, where (tradition says) the lords and ladies who accompanied King John to Ireland used to walk up and down of a summer evening, in the cool of the sunset wind. This of course is most probable, and it is perhaps a not unusual proceeding, still it is pleasant to recall. The lute must often have sounded across the waters of the lough in those golden evening hours, the careless laugh rung out, the silken cloak swung, and the gauzy veil fluttered from the high “sugar-loaf” head-dress, within sound of clanking chains, and cries from half-maddened, famishing, and tortured wretches below. One need go no deeper into history than any account of King John, to understand what kind of treatment his prisoners were likely to receive.
Greenore, at the mouth of Carlingford Lough, is the key to the passenger traffic between England and Belfast, Londonderry, Enniskillen, and other places in the north and northwest of Ireland. It is a remarkable fact that the strategic importance of Carlingford Lough should be thus recognized in a peaceful fashion at the end of the nineteenth century; for one recalls that the ruined castles at Carlingford and Greencastle were built by the Anglo-Normans, at the close of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries, to protect their lines of communication when invading, in a far different and more tragic fashion, the hills and dales of Ulster. The frowning ruins of Carlingford Castle still seem to guard the western shore of the lough, while the fortress of Greencastle, on the eastern shore, commands a glorious view from its lofty battlements.
Greenore supposedly presents many attractions for the tourist, but they are mainly of the kind set forth in the tourist programmes of the shipping companies and the railways, and, in fact, they are but of the conventional variety, though it is only fair to say they are here perused under very attractive and charming conditions. But the various journeyings of the collaborators to this volume were not for the sake of sea-bathing, golf, or tennis; hence Greenore is now dismissed—and gladly.
The railway runs the length of Carlingford Lough, along the base of Carlingford Mountain, which rises to nearly two thousand feet, to Newry at the head of the Lough, where, on a rock which projects into the river, stands Narrow Water Castle, built in 1663 on the site of a thirteenth-century edifice erected by Hugh de Lacy.
Ardglass, between Carlingford and Belfast Loughs, is seldom heard of in literature or the news items of the daily press; but it is a quaint little town of half a thousand inhabitants situated on the seacoast, with Dundrum Bay and the Mourne Mountains of County Down for a background.
Once it was the chief port of Ulster (its name, Ard-glas, means the green height), and was so important a town that it was guarded by seven castles, but one of which, Jordan’s Castle, is to-day in any state of preservation.
The county town of Down is Downpatrick. It is ancient and historic, and has a prospect,