Downpatrick

Kev and I went for a drive today, he took me to Downpatrick, a place where he spent a lot of time as a boy.  Its also the place the burial place for St. Patrick  at Down Cathedral. Down Cathedral existed when St. Patrick was a place of worship when Patrick was around, but little is know about what that building would have looked like.  In 1188 John De Courcy installed a community of monks and dedicated the Benedictine Abbey of Down to St. Patrick.  That building was destroyed by the invastion of Edward Bruce from Scotland, rebuilt in 1512 and destroyed yet again during the Tudor conquest but the ruins remained.  In 1787 they set about restoring and rebuilding the Cathedral to its former glory.  In 1826 the structure was completed and in 1987 the restoration was completed.

While in Down, we stopped at the County Museum, where I preceded to beat Kev at a life size game of chess.  The Museum is located within the County Goal and you can see old jail cells, dress from the time period, and the history of the county. From there we drove further into the Mourne Mountains, through Newcastle by the seashore where we stopped and had dinner at the Burrendale Country Club, and back into Belfast.