It’s getting round to tourist influx season again so I just thought it time I review some of our archaeological heritage.
If you are interested in the fairly recent past – like the twelfth century! – you might pay a visit to the so-called Bagenal’s Castle ….
… in Newry town, for this was the site of Newry’s famous Cistercian monastery established here almost nine hundred years ago. More on this can be found if you ‘Search’ these pages.
The site of the modern town may have been settled thousands of years before that, for the abundance of Bronze Age (and earlier) settlements in the neighbourhood indicates so, as does the fact that the famous east coast road (the Sliagh Midluacha – going from Newgrange, Meath to Dunseverick in Antrim) skirted the hills to the west of our town. It is estimated that there is 6000 years of continuous habitation, dating back to the time when man first appeared in Ireland!
Some of those early settlers left their mark on our landscape. From them we have three types of tomb represented here:
- Court tombs have a semi-circular ‘forecourt’ (which is how they got their name) bordered by a curving arc of standing stones.