27 August 1979
Narrow Water
Two miles up the A2 from the town, at the bridge by Narrow Water Castle, two roadside bombs detonated on a British Army convoy on the afternoon of 27 August 1979. The first was an 800-pound device hidden in a parked trailer of straw bales. Six soldiers died. As reinforcements arrived, a second bomb hidden across the road killed another twelve. Eighteen dead in total — the deadliest attack on the British Army in the entire Troubles. The same afternoon the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore. The river at the bridge is the border; the bombs were detonated by remote from the Cooley side. The proposed Narrow Water bridge between Co. Down and Co. Louth has been on and off the table for fifteen years; the foundations of a memorial garden sit by the road. Go quietly.
How the town began
The warren and the Halls
As late as 1780 the place was a handful of fishermen’s and oystermen’s huts on a rabbit warren at the mouth of the Newry River. The Hall family at Narrow Water Castle laid out a grid town on the spot — straight streets, big square, planted trees — and the port and the resort grew from there through the 1800s. The name is the warren’s point. There’s a competing theory that it’s a corruption of ‘Waring’s Point’, after a family that lived nearby. The warren version is older and more honest.
Genoa, since 1910
The Italians on the Square
Thomas Magliocco came from northern Italy in the late 1800s, worked his way north through the Welsh and English café trade and opened an ice-cream café on the Square in 1910. The O’Hare family — fourth generation Irish-Italian now — still run it. Same building, same trade. A small detail of how a working port town ended up with the oldest Italian café in this part of the country, and a perfectly good gelato to go with it.
Maiden of the Mournes
The Loughside Festival
The Maiden of the Mournes festival ran on the Square every August from the 1980s, named for the Percy French song and built around a community pageant. It rebranded as the Warrenpoint Loughside Festival a few years back — concerts, fireworks, funfair, family events over a long August weekend. Tens of thousands come in. Book a room weeks ahead. The town remains a town the rest of the year.