2010, after 1,169 years
The longphort confirmed
In 841 AD the Annals of Ulster record the founding of Linn Duachaill alongside the founding of Dubh Linn. For most of the next thousand years its location was a guess. From 2005 to 2007 a team led by archaeologist Mark Clinton, working with the National Monuments Service and a geophysicist, surveyed fields above Annagassan and picked up patterns of straight ditches that did not match the round ringforts of the native Irish. In 2010 a confirming dig went in. They found a defensive ditch and an earth rampart, a honestone, ironwork, animal bone — the signature of a Viking ship-camp. Mark Clinton's report sits in the Royal Irish Academy. The site is on private farmland but well-signed from the village; an interpretive panel above the strand walks you through the dig.
Older than the United States
The pub from 1770
The Glyde Inn has been pouring on the strand since 1770. It has stood through the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Land War, the Civil War, and most of the 20th century without changing very much. The Cassidy family run it now and have for decades. In 2018 the Irish Pub Awards in the RDS named it National Pub of the Year. Locals shrugged — they had always known. A bar this old in a village this small is unusual; it has survived because it is the only one and because it is genuinely good.
A medieval salt-pan
Salterstown and the saltworks
Two and a half kilometres south of Annagassan port is Salterstown — the townland where salt was made by evaporating seawater on a flat shore. The pier there now is a small fishing pier with a rocky beach and good wild swimming when the tide is in. The name (in Irish, Baile na Salainne — the town of the salt) is one of those Norman-era English names that survived intact while half the country reverted to Irish on the road signs. The estuary it sits in has Brent geese in winter and herons all year.
Holidays from Belfast
C.S. Lewis and Salterstown
Clive Staples Lewis — the Belfast-born author of the Narnia books — spent summer holidays as a child and a young man in the Annagassan and Salterstown area. The Lewis family had connections to the Mourne and Cooley coasts, and Lewis is on record describing the view across Dundalk Bay to the Mournes as one of the formative landscapes of his childhood. There is no plaque, no shop, no industry built around it. The light on the Cooleys at sunset is the only reminder, and it is plenty.