Dún Dealgan · Co. Louth
Cú Chulainn's home town, the last big stop before the border, and a county town that knows what it is.
Dundalk is not Carlingford, and that is its point. Forty-three thousand people, an industrial past, a working main street, a third-level institute, and a football team that has won the league five times in the last decade. It is the county town of Louth, a Pale frontier turned border town, and the first or last big stop on the M1 depending on which way you are driving.
The Normans built it. Bertram de Verdun put a manor at Castletown around 1185, and the motte where the locals now insist Cú Chulainn was born is on the same hill. The town that grew up around it ran on textiles, brewing, distilling, and from the 1820s onwards the P.J. Carroll tobacco factory which kept the place in work for nearly two centuries. Carrolls closed in 2005 and the building - designed by Ronnie Tallon, the Carrolls headquarters is one of the great pieces of mid-century Irish architecture - is now part of the Institute of Technology.
Don't come for postcards. Come for a pint in the Spirit Store on the quay where the music is properly programmed, a steak in the Lisdoo where they have been pouring Guinness since 1896, a match at Oriel Park if Dundalk FC are at home, a card or six at Dundalk Stadium on a winter evening, and a slow walk around St Patrick's Cathedral on the Roden Place side where the limestone soot still tells you what the town used to burn for fuel. The county museum across the way is housed in an 18th-century distillery warehouse and is small and good.
If you are using Dundalk as a base - which is the right way to use it - the Cooley Peninsula starts five minutes the other side of the bay, the Boyne Valley sites are forty minutes south, and Belfast is an hour. The Inner Bay at low tide with Slieve Foye across the water is one of the better views in Leinster. Most visitors miss it because they came in on the M1 and never got off.
