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DROGHEDA , clustered on either side of the river and tightly contained between two hills, is an enjoyable place in its own right: easily accessible and surprisingly unused to tourism. The precise grey stone of which the town is built, combined with its post-industrial decay, give it a slightly forbidding air, but it has a vitality that suits it well. The architectural legacy of successive civilizations forms the main attraction. The ancient Millmount mound and the Boyne itself echo the early habitation you'll see further upstream, but the history of Drogheda as a town really began with the Vikings , who arrived in 911 AD and founded a separate settlement on each bank. By bridging the ford between these two, the Danes gave the place its name - Droichead Atha , the Bridge of the Ford. By the fourteenth century, the walled town was one of the most important in the country, where the parliament would meet from time to time; remnants of medieval walls and abbeys lie like splinters throughout the town. As ever, though, most of what you see is from the eighteenth century or later, reflecting the sober style of the Protestant bourgeoisie after the horrific slaughter of Drogheda's defenders and inhabitants by Cromwell. The important surviving buildings of this age - the Tholsel, courthouse and St Peter's Church - have mellowed romantically and stand among the nineteenth-century flowering of triumphal churches, celebrating the relaxation of the persecuting stranglehold on Catholicism, and the riverside warehouses and huge rail viaduct that welcomed the industrial boom years. More recent development, with riverside laneways and suburban housing estates, has affected the flavour of the place very little: the past somehow seems stronger here than the present.
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