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The main N1 Dublin-Belfast road, and the train line, provide rapid access to County Louth and its principal town, Drogheda, and on to Dundalk and the North. En route you pass through County Meath, which on the coast is barely more than ten miles across, and you can cross over into Louth hardly noticing you've passed through. If you have any time on the way, though, there are some delightful old-fashioned resorts on the coast and a couple of fine, sandy beaches. Biggest of them is Bettystown , where there's plenty of dark sand, a campsite, various B&Bs and a superb seafood restaurant overlooking the bay, Bacchus at the Coastguard (tel 041/982 8251). Pleasant as it is, however, it's probably not somewhere you would want to spend a lot of time, especially if you're going to be seeing the west coast too. North of Bettystown the Boyne river, whose verdant valley is home to the most important cluster of megalithic monuments in the country including Monasterboice, Mellifont, and, nearby in County Meath, Newgrange , eventually finds the Irish Sea. The Boyne is not only important in prehistory but modern history too, as it was here, in 1690, that if not the most significant certainly the most celebrated battle in Irish history took place, when the forces of Protestant King William of Orange defeated those of Catholic King James; a battle which is celebrated annually on the streets of Northern Ireland on July 12, the climax of Ulster's now infamous "marching season" . The historic town of Drogheda , is also closely associated with seventeenth-century English politics, most especially Oliver Cromwell whose New Model Army (ironically the first republican army in Ireland) breached the city's walls in 1649 and massacred its royalist garrison with typical zeal. The county is also famous for mythological as well as actual warfare as it was here that the hero of Ulster, Cuchulainn, single-handedly defeated the forces of the rest of Ireland in the great Irish epic the Ttel in Bo Cuailnge (the Cattle Raid of Cooley); much of the county, from the inland town of Ardee where Cuchulainn eventually killed his best friend Ferdia, to the Cooley mountains where most of the battles took place, are closely associated with the story. The Cooley mountains cover much of the Carlingford peninsula, the furthest point north on the Republic's eastern seaboard, and from here it's hard to believe that the towns of Rostrevor and Warrenpoint on the other side of the lough are, in fact, in another country. This sense of Louth as a crossing point between Leinster and Ulster (since 1922 Southern and Northern Ireland) is most keenly felt in the town of Dundalk which, despite the peace process, still exudes the slightly forbidding air of a border town and is seen as the home of hawkish republicanism.
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