A Spanish bride at the Windy Gap
The Long Woman's Grave
On the back road over the Cooley Mountains from Jenkinstown to Omeath, at the saddle locally called the Windy Gap, a low cairn marks what tradition calls the Long Woman's Grave. The version told in the parish is this: Lorcan O'Hanlon, youngest son of the chieftain of Omeath, sailed to Spain, rescued a nobleman and his seven-foot daughter Cauthleen at sea, married her, and brought her home. His older brothers had inherited the good lowland; Lorcan got a stretch of mountain bog. When Cauthleen saw it she fainted dead and never recovered. She was buried where she fell, under the stones at the Gap. The cairn is on the saddle, the view from the lay-by is one of the best on the peninsula, and the story has the indispensable quality of being too specific to be entirely invented.
Five men, a cottage, a bomb
Edentubber, 1957
On the morning of 11 November 1957 a cottage on Edentubber Mountain, three hundred yards from the Carrickarnon border post on the Dundalk–Newry road, exploded. Five members of the IRA died in the blast — Paul Smith, Patrick Parle, Oliver Craven, Michael Watters and George Keegan — when their own bomb detonated as they were preparing it for an action in the North. They are commemorated as the Edentubber Martyrs in republican tradition; it was the largest single loss the IRA suffered during the 1956–62 Border Campaign. A memorial stands at the roadside above the village. It is part of the local history; whether you stop is a private call.
A Cooley restaurant on the Michelin page
Fitzpatrick's and the rise of the country pub
There used to be Irish country pubs that did food because the regulars wanted toasted sandwiches at half-past nine. There are now Irish country pubs that do food because Dublin couples drive an hour for the Sunday lunch. Fitzpatrick's on the Rockmarshall stretch of the R173 is the second kind. Three generations of the family, a kitchen that takes the seafood out of Carlingford Lough seriously, and the Michelin Eating Out Guide page a decade ago that confirmed what the locals already knew. The decoration is half-museum: hundreds of vintage signs, old farm implements, photographs of the village a century ago. The plates are not vintage. Book ahead.
Where Jenkinstown belongs
The parish of Lordship & Ballymascanlan
Civil and ecclesiastical Ireland do not always agree, and Jenkinstown sits inside the larger Catholic parish of Lordship & Ballymascanlan in the Archdiocese of Armagh. The parish covers the foothills from Ballymascanlan through Lordship to Rampark, with three churches and one community. St Patrick's GFC at Lordship — founded 1953, seven Senior Football Championships by the end of 2015 — carries the parish flag in football. The Catholic chapel south of the Jenkinstown crossroads is one of the parish's three churches. This kind of joined-up parish is why a small village like Jenkinstown feels woven in rather than lonely.