Menu
- Home
- Search▼
- List▼
- Add▼
- My Relate▼
- Admin▼
ViewsWatchers |
Contained Places
Kilkeel[1] is a small town, civil parish and townland (of 554 acres and 6521inh) in County Down, Northern Ireland. It is the southernmost town in Northern Ireland. It lies within the historic barony of Mourne. Kilkeel town is the main fishing port on the Down coast, and its harbour is home to the largest fishing fleet in Northern Ireland. It had a population of 6,541 people at the 2011 Census. The town contains the ruins of a 14th-century church and fort, winding streets and terraced shops. It lies just south of the Mourne Mountains. [edit] History
Kilkeel takes its name from the old church overlooking the town, it being the anglicised version of the Gaelic 'Cill Chaoil' meaning "church of the narrow place". The name may be drawn from the church's location on a narrow site between the Aughrim and Kilkeel rivers.[1] The church was built in 1388 and dedicated to "St Colman Del Mourne". It was thought to be the principal church in a group which included Kilmegan and Kilcoo despite the fact that Kilkeel was very sparsely populated in the Middle Ages. There are references to Kilkeel as a Christian settlement as far back as the 11th century. The cemetery attached to the church was used for burials until 1916. The last burials at the cemetery were victims of a collision between two steamers, the Retriever and the SS Connemara, in Carlingford Lough. The Mary Joseph (N55) is now in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra. A local history group, set up in the 1980s and covering both the town of Kilkeel and the Mourne region, has produced a set of seven periodicals called The 12 Miles of Mourne. A book on Hanna's Close, a clachan of houses in Aughnahoory townland one mile outside of Kilkeel, that covers the history of the region up to 1798, was self-published in 2008. [edit] Research Tips
|
|||||||||||||||||
