What the name means
Páirc an Reithin
Rampark is the anglicisation of Páirc an Reithin — usually read as the Field of the Little Ram, though logainm.ie offers more than one possible derivation. Townland names in this part of north Louth are mostly Norse-and-Norman over a Gaelic base, and many of them refer to small features of the land that mattered to whoever was farming a single field. The townland is one of dozens that fold up under the parish of Lordship & Ballymascanlan. The R173 cut through it when the road was built; the school anchored a hamlet at the junction; the speed cushions came in this century when the village population grew enough to ask for them.
St Mary's, Bellurgan, 1860
The parish of Lordship & Ballymascanlan
Rampark sits inside the Catholic parish of Lordship & Ballymascanlan, sometimes called Ravensdale, in the Archdiocese of Armagh. The parish church, St Mary's at Bellurgan, was built around 1860; the older parochial centre was at Ballymascanlan further west. A second church, the chapel at Lordship near Bush, serves the lower part of the parish. The parish school list includes Rampark NS on the main road, Bellurgan NS down toward the bay, and Bush Post Primary up the road. This is the working anatomy of an Irish rural parish — a couple of churches, a few schools, a GAA club, and the families who have been here since the registers started.
Founded 1953, seven Senior titles to 2015
St Patrick's GFC, Lordship
Twenty-seven local people met in 1953 to form a club that would represent the parish of Lordship & Ballymascanlan in Louth GAA. They settled on the name St Patrick's GFC. The club reached its first Louth Senior Football Championship final in 1995, beat St Mary's in a replay to win their first Joe Ward Cup, and went on to take seven Senior titles by the end of 2015 — much of it on the back of Louth All-Star Paddy Keenan. The pitches at Lordship near Bush are the parish weekend hub. Rampark people are St Pat's people. Sunday afternoons in summer the cars line the R173 verges.
A regional road that holds the peninsula
The R173 and the road
The Cooley Peninsula is ringed by one road — the R173, regional class, two lanes, a hundred and thirty-five metres above sea level at the Windy Gap saddle. Before the road took its current line in the twentieth century, the route from Dundalk out to Carlingford ran further inland through Ballymascanlan and over the mountain. The bay road that passes Rampark — straight along the foreshore through Bellurgan, Lordship and Rampark — is largely a 19th- and 20th-century rebuild that put the houses and the school where they are. The road made the hamlet. Without it, Rampark is two field names.