200 stalls, two currencies, no off-season
The Sunday market
The market runs every Sunday on and around the village green. It started small in the 1970s and grew into one of the biggest open-air markets on the island during the years when the price differential across the border was its own attraction. It survived the Troubles because the Troubles couldn't stop it — buses kept coming up from Dundalk, Drogheda, Dublin. Sterling and euro both spend. Bring cash. Anything that looks too cheap to be real probably is.
The road every army took
The Gap of the North
The Moyry Pass is the natural corridor between Ulster and Leinster, walled in by Slieve Gullion to the west and the Cooleys to the east. Edward Bruce went through it in 1315. Hugh O'Neill held it against the English in 1600 — they took heavy losses trying to force it. Mountjoy finally pushed through in 1601 and built Moyry Castle on a rocky outcrop to keep it. The keep is still there, three storeys with rounded corners and gun-loops, ten minutes' walk from the village.
c. 700 AD
The Kilnasaggart Stone
Two kilometres south, in a quiet field in Edenappa townland, stands a 2-metre pillar of granite with crosses carved on its faces and a Gaelic inscription that says, more or less, 'Ternoc, son of Ciarán the Little, bequeathed this place under the protection of the Apostle Peter.' There is also Ogham on it — older, partly chiselled off when the Christians took the stone over. It is regarded as one of the oldest dated Christian inscribed stones in Ireland. You walk a lane to get to it. There is no visitor centre, no ticket, no fence. Just the stone in the field.
A border village in the 20th century
The smuggling years
For most of the 20th century, what came across the line at Jonesborough — cigarettes, fuel, livestock, washing powder, butter, anything where the price gap made it worth the trouble — was a working-class economy that nobody wrote down. The customs post on the Edenappa Road was a fact of life. People do not talk about it much because it would name names that are still attached to people. The Single Market killed most of the trade in 1993; Brexit brought a smaller version of it back. The market on Sunday is, in a sense, the legal end of all that.
Edenappa Road, 20 March
The 1989 ambush
On 20 March 1989, two senior RUC officers — Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan — were shot dead by the Provisional IRA's South Armagh Brigade on the Edenappa Road, less than a kilometre south of the village. They had been at a security meeting at Dundalk Garda station and were driving back unescorted. It was the highest-ranking RUC killing of the conflict. There is no plaque. The road is just a road. Read about it before you walk it.