They call it the Wee County. Louth is the smallest of Ireland's thirty-two counties by land area, smaller than New York City, and yet it carries more history per square kilometre than almost anywhere else on the island. It is named for Lugh, a god of the ancient Irish. It is where Cu Chulainn defended Ulster from Queen Medb's armies in the Tain Bo Cuailnge. It is where Vikings built a longphort at Annagassan in the ninth century, where Edward Bruce was crowned would-be High King of Ireland in 1316, where Oliver Cromwell slaughtered the garrison of Drogheda in 1649, and where the M1 motorway now carries commuters between Dublin and Belfast.
The county takes its name from the village of Louth, which in turn is named for Lugh - the shining one, the master-of-many-arts, the god whose summer festival of Lughnasadh once marked the start of the harvest across the Gaelic world. The older Irish spellings of the place vary: Lugmad, Lughmhaigh, Lughmhadh. The modern simplified form is simply Lu. Louth's pre-Christian roots show through everywhere in its landscape and literature. The Cooley Peninsula in the north of the county is the setting for the Tain Bo Cuailnge, the great epic of the Ulster Cycle, in which Queen Medb of Connacht crosses the Shannon to seize the Brown Bull of Cooley and is held off by the boy-hero Cu Chulainn at the ford. The hills and bogs of north Louth still carry the names the saga gave them.
Before the Normans came, Louth was three sub-kingdoms - Conaille Muirtheimne, Fir Rois, and the Fir Arda Ciannachta - each subject to different overlords. In the 12th century they were united into the O'Carroll Kingdom of Airgialla, also called Oriel. Then in the 1180s the Anglo-Normans arrived. Bertram de Verdun raised a manor house at Castletown Mount, near Dundalk, in 1189. His granddaughter Roesia later built Castle Roche in 1236. The Normans turned Oriel into the County of Louth and made it part of the Pale - the English-controlled district radiating out from Dublin, the line beyond which Gaelic Ireland still ruled. Until 1596 Louth was technically part of Ulster. A conference at Faughart between Hugh O'Neill and the English moved it into Leinster, where it has stayed ever since. It is the only Leinster county to share a border with Northern Ireland.
Louth sat on the main road from Dublin to Ulster, and that put it in the path of nearly every army that marched across Ireland. Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king Robert, landed in Ulster in 1315 and pushed south. He was crowned on a hill near Dundalk in May 1316. By 1318 he was dead, killed at the Battle of Faughart. Three centuries later Cromwell stormed Drogheda in 1649 and killed the Royalist garrison along with hundreds of the town's people - one of the most notorious atrocities of his Irish campaign. In 1690, James II and William of Orange faced each other 3 km west of Drogheda at the Battle of the Boyne. Drogheda held for James until the day after the battle, when it surrendered to William. In 1798 several Louth men joined the United Irishmen rising. Betrayed by informers, many were hanged.
On the Cooley Peninsula, hard against the Northern Irish border, Irish was spoken as a living language into the middle of the 20th century. The dialect was Gaeilge Airgialla - Oriel Irish - and it had its own songs, idioms, and grammatical quirks. The last native speaker, Anne O'Hanlon, died in 1960 at the age of 89. By the time she went, the German linguist Wilhelm Doegen had recorded extensive samples of the dialect for the Royal Irish Academy in 1928, and those recordings are now the only surviving voice of a tongue that once carried the cattle-raid stories across the headlands. Curiously, Cooley also had a sizable population of Presbyterian Irish speakers in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1808 the Reverend William Neilson published a Gaeilge primer specifically for Presbyterian ministers serving congregations who could not speak English.
Louth has just over 139,000 people on 826 square kilometres, making it the second-most densely populated county in the Republic. Its two towns, Dundalk in the north and Drogheda in the south, together hold nearly 60 percent of that population and rank as the sixth- and seventh-largest urban areas in Ireland. The M1 motorway, finished in stages from the late 1990s through 2010, runs straight through the county on the Dublin-Belfast corridor. The county council is based in Dundalk. The Catholic Church here is part of the Archdiocese of Armagh, whose Archbishop has carried the title Primate of All Ireland since 1353. Famous Louth names include Bartholomew Teeling of the 1798 rebellion, the priest-physicist Nicholas Callan of Darver - inventor of the first induction coil - and, since 2016, an honorary Freeman of the county: Joseph Robinette Biden.
County Louth covers roughly 53.7 N to 54.1 N, and 6.2 W to 6.9 W, on the east coast of Ireland between Dundalk Bay and the mouth of the Boyne. From cruising altitude the broad inlet of Dundalk Bay and the deeper, more dramatic Carlingford Lough at the Northern Ireland border are the dominant features, with the Cooley Mountains rising sharply on the lough's southern shore. Dublin Airport (EIDW) sits about 50 km south of Drogheda; Belfast International (EGAA) is about 60 km north of Dundalk. The M1 motorway is the most useful linear landmark, running the full length of the county. The county is the smallest in Ireland - small enough to cross in a 20-minute flight.