1892, and the Tom Simpson rebuild
County Louth Golf Club
The club was founded in 1892 by a group of Drogheda professionals — solicitors, doctors, the local bank manager — who wanted a links to play on the dunes north of the Boyne. The original nine-hole course was rough-and-ready. In 1938 the club commissioned Tom Simpson — the English architect responsible for Cruden Bay, Royal Antwerp, and a string of celebrated continental courses — to redesign the layout. Simpson's plan is broadly what is played today: eighteen holes routed cleverly through the dune system, no two consecutive holes playing in the same direction, the wind always different, the greens small and fast. Donald Steel did a sensitive restoration in the 2000s, recovering bunkers and lines that had drifted. The club has hosted the East of Ireland championship every year since 1941 — the longest-running annual amateur in the country. The professional Irish Open came in 2004, when Brett Rumford won, and again in 2009 when a young amateur from Esker Hills called Shane Lowry holed a putt on the third extra hole of a play-off and changed his life.
A protected stretch of mud, sand and birds
The Boyne Estuary
The Boyne Estuary Special Protection Area — Site Code 4080, designated under EU Birds Directive Regulations 2011 — covers the tidal Boyne from downstream of Drogheda to the open sea, including the spit at Baltray and the strand to the south. The site supports a mean peak of over 6,000 golden plover, internationally important numbers, plus large counts of redshank, oystercatcher, lapwing, dunlin and curlew on autumn and winter passage. The breeding little tern colony — fourteen pairs in 1995, monitored each year by Louth Nature Trust wardens with Heritage Council and NPWS support — nests on the strand south of the village from May to August. Cordoned area, dog leads, no driving on the dunes. The conservation has held; the colony is one of the few breeding sites for the species on the east coast.
Two pillars, one solstice alignment
The standing stones
About half a kilometre south-west of the village, in a field on the left of the Baltray road, two standing stones rise out of the grass. They are not signposted from any road. Local antiquarian Martin Brennan and the writer Anne-Marie Moroney showed in the 1990s that the line drawn from the smaller stone over the larger one points to the winter solstice sunrise, with the disc of the sun appearing precisely behind the small island of Rockabill in the Irish Sea on the morning of 21 December. The stones are dated stylistically to the late Neolithic or Bronze Age. Are they older than Newgrange (3200 BC) inland? It is argued. The argument is not settled. They are free, in a field, with cows. The locals know where they are; ask in The Boyne.
The Maiden Tower and the Lady's Finger
The lighthouses across the river
Across the estuary on the Mornington side, two 16th-century navigation marks frame the river mouth. The Maiden Tower — a square crenellated stone tower built in the reign of Mary I (1553–1558), supposedly named for the queen — was erected to guide pilots up the Boyne to Drogheda. The Lady's Finger — a tapering circular pillar a few hundred metres downriver from the tower — completes the alignment. Together with the modern East and West Lights they have brought ships up to Drogheda for nearly five hundred years. From Baltray you see them across the river. From the dune ridge above the 14th green at County Louth you see all of it: the tower, the pillar, the river mouth, the Mournes in the distance on a clear day.