King John spent two days here in 1210. He had crossed the Irish Sea with an army, intent on bringing his Anglo-Norman barons in Ireland back under royal control, and on the way down from Carrickfergus to Dublin he stopped at the castle that Hugh de Lacy had begun building on a rocky outcrop overlooking Carlingford Lough. The castle has carried the king's name ever since. Today it is a substantial ruin standing on its rock above the harbour, the lough opening to the east toward the Irish Sea and the steep flank of Slieve Foy rising sharply behind. The narrow streets of the medieval town still curl around the castle's foot, hardly changed in their footprint since the 14th century.
The name Carlingford comes from Old Norse: Kerlingfjordhr, the fjord of the hag - a fjord, narrow and dramatic, that the Norse called by reference to one of the rock features above its mouth. Vikings used Carlingford Lough as a sheltered anchorage from the 9th century, and the Hiberno-Norse settlement they left behind shows up in nearby placenames. When Hugh de Lacy arrived in the 1180s, granted the Lordship of Meath by Henry II, he chose the strategic outcrop above the lough as the site for a new Anglo-Norman castle. His western wall and tower went up before 1186. King John's 1210 visit added the name. Half a century later the eastern wing was built. The castle controlled both the narrow coastal road and the only practical pass between the lough and the rest of Ireland - the gap between Slieve Foy and the Mourne Mountains across the water.
Carlingford received five royal charters between 1326 and 1619 - the first from Edward II, the last from James I - and during the 14th, 15th, and early 16th centuries it was one of the principal trading ports on the Irish east coast, ranked alongside Drogheda and Carrickfergus. The town walls went up under the 1326 charter. The murder-holes that survive in the surviving section of wall, and the splayed musket loops cut into them later, mark the long evolution of medieval defensive architecture. The local industry was oysters: green-finned Carlingford oysters, famous across Britain and Europe by the late Middle Ages. The herring fishery added to the prosperity. Wealthy merchants built fortified townhouses still visible today: Taaffe's Castle near the harbour, with its two-phase 16th-century construction; the Mint, a three-storey limestone townhouse with five highly decorated windows full of Celtic Renaissance motifs - despite its name, probably never an actual coining mint.
On Tholsel Street stands the only surviving gate of the medieval walled town. The Tholsel - the word means "toll house" - was originally a three-storey gateway over the road into Carlingford, where officials levied taxes on goods entering the market town. The murder-holes set into its walls are a reminder of what defenders were prepared to do if the gate was attacked. By the 18th century the Tholsel served as the town jail. In 1834 the Corporation of Carlingford met inside it for civic business; local tradition says a Parliament once used it to make laws for The Pale. The 19th-century alterations that gave the building its present low profile have left only the lower portion of the original gate visible. It is one of very few surviving tholsels in Ireland and effectively the last visible fragment of the medieval town gate system.
The Irish Rebellion of 1641, Cromwell's conquest of Ireland in 1649, and the Williamite War of the 1690s all damaged Carlingford severely. By 1744 the antiquarian Isaac Butler recorded the town as being in "a state of ruin." The herring shoals that had filled the lough for centuries departed to open water in the early 18th century, finishing the local fishery. The Dominican Friary, established in 1305 under the patronage of Richard Og de Burgh, 2nd Earl of Ulster, and dedicated to St Malachy, was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540, briefly disputed between Dominicans and Franciscans in the 1670s before Oliver Plunkett resolved the dispute in favour of the Dominicans, then abandoned by the order in the 18th century when they moved to Dundalk. Tourism arrived in the 1870s with the Dundalk, Newry and Greenore Railway. The line closed in 1951 but by then the visitors were established. Carlingford won the Irish Tidy Towns Competition in 1988 and remains a magnet for visitors today, with an annual Oyster Festival in August and a marina.
Thomas D'Arcy McGee was born in Carlingford on 13 April 1825. He emigrated to North America, became a Father of Canadian Confederation in 1867, and was assassinated on the steps of his Ottawa boarding house on 7 April 1868 - the first Canadian politician ever to be murdered. The killer, Patrick James Whelan, was reportedly a Fenian who objected to McGee's moderate views on Irish nationalism. Peter Boyle, born in Carlingford in 1876, played five times for Ireland in football and won the FA Cup with Sheffield United in 1899 and 1902. Tony Meehan, the founding drummer of The Shadows - Cliff Richard's backing band on every early hit - was born in London but is buried in Carlingford cemetery. The Irish songwriter Tommy Makem wrote "Farewell to Carlingford," a melancholy ballad covered by The Clancy Brothers and The Dubliners. In tradition, St Patrick is said to have made his second Irish landing nearby in 432 AD, on his return from Britain to begin his mission. Carlingford keeps its old stories close.
Carlingford sits at 54.04 N, 6.19 W on the southern shore of Carlingford Lough, on the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth. The dramatic feature from the air is the lough itself - a long narrow sea inlet (in fact a fjord, classed as Ireland's only true fjord) running northwest from the Irish Sea, with the Cooley Mountains rising steeply on its southern shore and the Mournes on the north. Slieve Foy, the highest peak of the Cooley range at 589 m, towers directly behind the town. The Northern Ireland border runs down the middle of the lough. Belfast (EGAA) is about 75 km north; Dublin (EIDW) is roughly 95 km south. The M1 motorway lies about 15 km west via Dundalk.