May 14 – Drive to Carlington and the Mourne Mountains

We are out driving today in beautiful sunny warm weather (the “heat wave” continues, lucky us).  We headed out to try to find the scenic routes that were noted on our map.  Of course, we are finding everything in Ireland and Northern Ireland is very scenic…just some a bit more so than others.

Specifically we headed to Carlington.  It was a quintessential medieval town with narrow, windy streets, 

a pretty old church (now a heritage center),

and the ruins of a priory that was destroyed during the dissolution under Henry VIII.

Then we drove along the Carrington Lough, a long inlet that became very narrow near the end. 

One of the towns we drove through was Warrenpoint.  We stopped along the waterfront to take pictures of the lough.  A long row of narrow townhouses faced the water. 

From there we headed into Northern Ireland to the Cooley Peninsula where we drove through the beautiful Mourne Mountains.

We managed to take an extremely long route back to the castle.  Tara had told us that the castle was in Cavan.  Turns out there is a County Cavan and a town named Cavan.  We just assumed it was the town.  When we were almost there we discovered that the castle was another 30 plus miles away.  Unfortunately our cellphone was almost drained so we had to keep turning off the GPS…this contributed to the getting lost.  But we finally made it home to our home in the castle.