Discover Drogheda

A town built on both banks of the Boyne

Drogheda takes its name from Droichead Atha, the bridge of the ford, and it grew up around the last crossing of the River Boyne before the river reaches the sea. It began as two towns rather than one, Drogheda in Meath on the south bank and Drogheda in Oriel on the north, each with its own charter, and they were only united in 1412. The river still marks a line: the archdiocese of Armagh runs to the north bank and the diocese of Meath to the south, and the county boundary means part of the town is counted in Co. Meath and most of it in Co. Louth. With 44,135 people at the 2022 census it is the largest town in Ireland, and it has the shops, restaurants, arts centre and hospital to match, rather than the thin high street of a heritage village.

What survives from the medieval walled town is worth walking for: St Laurence's Gate, a 13th-century barbican with traffic still passing under it, Magdalene Tower on the high ground, the Butter Gate below Millmount, and the Tholsel of 1770 where West Street meets Shop Street. Above the south bank is Millmount, an Anglo-Norman mound raised before 1186 with a Martello tower on top and the Old Drogheda Society's museum around its base, and the view from up there is the one that makes the shape of the town make sense. Downriver, the Boyne Viaduct carries the Dublin to Belfast railway across the water on stone piers and iron trusses. Upriver are Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, Mellifont and Monasterboice, which is why the town calls itself the gateway to the Boyne Valley and means it.