The Mourne Mountains

The Mourne Mountains, in the south east corner of County Down are known, by name at least, all over the world. This is due, in some part to the popular song by Percy French, "Where the Mountains sweep down to the sea". The range stretches from Newcastle, where Slieve Donard, the highest peak in Northern Ireland (852m), towers over the holiday resort to Rostrevor, some fifteen miles to the south west. At its widest point this mountain mass is around seven miles and above 200m is not arable and virtually uninhabited, except of course for the local sheep which roam freely over this range and manage to find enough to eat to end up as the Sunday roast.

The Mournes are among the youngest of Ireland's mountains. For millions of years the hard granite from which they are formed lay buried deep beneath several thousand feet of sedimentary rocks and it was not until the long process of erosion was well advanced - possibly around thirty million years ago - that the more resistant igneous granite was exposed. Various ice ages have played their part in altering the appearance of the mountains when countless gigantic boulders were swept down to the coastal plain to form raised beaches.

The range contains more than sixty separate hills, with nine of them rising to more than 600 metres. Most of the highest peaks are grouped together in the north-east part of the range in what is generally regarded as the High Mournes. According to tradition it was a cow-herd king named Boirche who, during Celtic times, ruled his Kingdom "from Dunseverick to the Boyne" from the summit of Slieve Binnian, that gave the Mournes their earlier name of "Beanna (peaks of) Boirche".

The are two schools of thought on the present day name of Mourne. According to Harris, (1744) the name derives from the Gaelic words more and rinn (great headland). The other version is that the name was brought to the area in the twelfth century by members of the McMahon clan from their homelands in Cremourne, "the territory of the Mughdhorna" in Co. Monaghan. The latter version of the origin of the name is now generally accepted as being the more beleivable version.