County Down - Towns

An unpretentious bucket-and-spade resort of fish-and-chip shops and acres of caravan sites.

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Though small, Moira feels like a real town, with a town hall, built about 1800, a wide main street lined with red berried rowans and eighteenth century blackstone houses divided by carriage archways. Built mostly by Sir Arthur Rawdon, whose famous formal gardens have vanished, the town has a habit of winning civic flower awards. For most of the year the place is a mass of flowering shrubs, roses, flowerbeds and hanging baskets. On the north side, a long grassy avenue terminates in Moira parish church, a rather top heavy but most appealing building of 1723 where William Butler Yeats was curate in the 1830's. The communion rails came from the staircase of the Rawdon mansion. Looking down from the church, the lawns seem to continue unbroken, into the flowerbeds and trees of the old Rawdon demesne but they are in fact bisected by the busy A3 trunk road. The road opposite Station Road leads to Berwick Hall, a thatched yeoman's house of 1700. Moira was the scene of a victory in AD637 by the King of Tara over Comgall, King of Ulster.

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Approached from Dundrum, the resort of Newcastle seems quite spacious with a curved raised beach. Percy French (1854-1920) celebrated Newcastle 'where the mountains of Mourne Sweep down to the sea' in his popular song and the grateful town built him a memorial fountain in the promenade gardens.

The most distinctive building in the town, a 1960s Roman Catholic Church with a green copper parasol roof, is visible from far off.

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The cathedral town of Newry is well placed at the head of the 'Gap of the North'. Through this pass between two ranges of hills the men of Ulster sailed forth to harry the tribes of Leinster in the days of the Fianna legends. Because of its strategic position, the town was repeatedly destroyed in the wars for the control of the North. The town attracts shoppers in great numbers both from Northern Ireland and the Republic.

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Newtownards a manufacturing and market garden town a bit inland from the head of the lough, dates from the thirteenth century when a Dominican priory was founded by Walter de Burgh.

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