Newcastle Beach Down
Newcastle in County Down is the principal resort town of the Mourne coast, a Victorian seaside town set between the sandy expanse of Dundrum Bay and the dramatic mountain wall of the Mourne Mountains that rise to Slieve Donard, the highest peak in Ulster, immediately behind the seafront. The combination of the long sandy beach, the mountain backdrop and the traditional seaside resort character of the town makes Newcastle one of the most scenically spectacular resort settings in Ireland, the juxtaposition of sea and mountain rarely found so closely together on the Irish coast. The beach at Newcastle is a broad, south-facing arc of sand approximately two miles long that provides excellent bathing and walking with the mountain views as a constant backdrop. The town's Victorian and Edwardian seaside architecture, including the distinctive Royal County Down Golf Club founded in 1889 whose links course is consistently ranked among the finest in the world, gives Newcastle a layered character that combines the functional pleasures of a seaside resort with the visual drama of its extraordinary setting. The Mourne Mountains, rising steeply from the town to Slieve Donard at 849 metres, provide walking of exceptional quality directly accessible from the seafront. The Donard Park at the edge of town provides the standard approach to Slieve Donard, and the Mourne Wall, a dry-stone boundary wall built between 1904 and 1922 enclosing the water catchment of the Silent Valley reservoir, traverses fifteen Mourne summits in a circuit of approximately thirty-five kilometres that is one of the most ambitious dry-stone engineering projects of the twentieth century. The town's position on the edge of the Mournes and the proximity of Tollymore Forest Park, Castlewellan Forest Park and the Mourne Coastal Route make Newcastle an excellent base for exploring the entire area.