Ard Ghlais · Co. Down
Seven medieval tower houses in a village of seventeen hundred. Then a working trawler comes in.
Ardglass is a small fishing village with the bones of a much bigger town. In the 15th century this was the busiest port in Ulster - an Anglo-Norman trading hub close enough to the Isle of Man and the English ports to matter, far enough up the Irish Sea to need defending. The merchants built tower houses around the harbour the way merchants elsewhere built warehouses. Six or seven of them, depending who you ask. Four are still standing. One is a golf clubhouse. One is a museum that opens when it opens. The rest you walk past and forget for a second that they are 600 years old.
The fishing never quite went. Ardglass is one of three working fishing harbours in Northern Ireland, and thirty-plus trawlers still call it home. Herring made the place famous twice - once in the medieval boom, once in the 19th-century industrial boom when William Ogilvie rebuilt the harbour and the Scottish fleet came down for the season. The fish has changed. The boats have changed. The smell at the working end of the pier has not.
Then there is the village itself, which is mostly one long curve of houses around the bay, a couple of pubs, a chipper, an Italian that has been there fifty years, a brewery on High Street, and a quietness that surprises you given the size of the history. Van Morrison stopped here for mussels and potted herrings in Coney Island and put it in the song. That is roughly the size of Ardglass - small, specific, and casually loaded.
