Ó Méith · Co. Louth
The last village before the border, on the south shore of the lough, looking across at Warrenpoint.
Omeath sits on the south shore of Carlingford Lough at the end of the Cooley Peninsula, the last Irish village before the border with Co. Down. Six hundred people, one hotel, one pub, a pier, and a Calvary on the hillside above the road. The Mournes fill the view across the water. Warrenpoint is half a kilometre away across the lough - and, for now, the long way round by Newry to reach it.
It was a railway village. The Dundalk, Newry & Greenore line opened a station here in 1876 and Northern day-trippers came down for fresh air, fishing and the kind of drink they could not get on a Sunday at home. The line closed in 1951; the trackbed is now the Carlingford Lough Greenway. The older history is stranger - a Gaeltacht into the 1950s, the eastern outpost of Irish-speaking Ireland, with a dialect linguists travelled north from Dublin to record, and an Irish college in the Park Hotel where Padraig Pearse once stayed.
Don't come for a checklist. Come for a slow cycle on the Greenway from Carlingford with the Mournes on the right shoulder, a pint in Howe's - the village's one pub, going since the 1860s - a wander up to the Calvary that Italian missionaries built with French statues in 1908, and dinner in the Seaview at the reopened Grand Central Hotel where the lough does most of the work. An afternoon, a long lunch, and back to Carlingford for the night. Or a night here, which is the quieter call.
Change is coming. The Narrow Water Bridge is finally being built, joining Omeath to Warrenpoint by road around 2027. The old foot ferry has already stopped, and the grand Park Hotel that housed the Irish college has stood derelict since 2006. The village is smaller than it was and about to be better connected than it has ever been. Come and see it in the in-between.
