Newcastle

Ice Cream and the Promenade

Maud's has been selling ice cream on the promenade since 1992, and its signature flavour is a honeycomb one called Poor Bear's Delight. In 2004 Maud's became the first ice cream maker in all of Ireland to be named Champion of Champions by the Ice Cream Alliance. If you want the newer competition, Nugelato a little further along sells something called a Nuggy Burrito. Between them they have the seafront's sweet-tooth economy covered.

The promenade itself won a Civic Trust Award in 2006, which is the sort of thing a town mentions and then doesn't stop mentioning. It runs along the seafront with the sea on one side and cafés and shops on the other, and behind the whole arrangement Slieve Donard rises to 849 metres — the highest peak in the Mournes and in Northern Ireland. Newcastle sits at the exact point where the mountains meet the sea on Dundrum Bay. Three rivers, the Shimna, the Burren and the Tullybranigan, all arrive in the town and empty into the water.

Percy French and the Pub Sessions

Percy French wrote "The Mountains of Mourne" about these hills. The refrain — "Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea" — is describing the view you're standing in.

Macken's Bar sits on the South Promenade by the harbour and is, by local reckoning, "a Newcastle institution." It serves tacos, chowder and mussels, and top musicians turn up through the week for jam sessions, open-mic nights and Irish traditional sessions. The Harbour House Inn, family-owned and 19th-century, runs top players on Saturday nights and traditional sessions on Sundays. The Anchor Bar in South Newcastle deals in local craft beer and cider. Quinn's, in the 1920s and 1930s, was a pub at the back with a grocer's shop at the front and was known as "The Milestone." Out toward Castlewellan, the Maghera Inn has reportedly been trading for over 200 years and gets called one of the finest pub restaurants in Northern Ireland.

The Glen River Ascent

The obvious walk is Slieve Donard by the Glen River Path, starting from Donard Car Park in town, following the river up through the forest to the Mourne Wall and then left to the summit — four to five hours there and back, with the Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales visible on a clear day. If that's more mountain than you want, Tollymore Forest Park is a short drive off for riverside walking, and the Brandy Pad is an old smuggling route that once moved illegal brandy through the range.

Granite, Harbour and Loss

The harbour was built by Lord Annesley around 1820 to ship out Mourne granite, which ended up as paving in London and New York and under the 9/11 memorial. In 1843 a gale caught fourteen fishing boats and drowned 73 men, 46 of them from Newcastle. A local song recorded the aftermath plainly: "Newcastle town is one long street entirely stripped of men." The survivors' families were housed in Widows Row, twelve cottages raised by public subscription, which are still standing.

The Tropicana Slides

For the children there's the Tropicana, a pair of heated shallow pools on the promenade with a twisting yellow slide and a smaller one shaped like an elephant. The elephant is for the ones who aren't sure about the yellow slide yet.