Downpatrick Head

Where it sits. Downpatrick is the county town of Down, a market town of around eleven thousand people set among drumlins where the River Quoile meets the marshland at the head of Strangford Lough. It lies thirty-five kilometres south of Belfast on the A7 and about the same distance north-east of Newry, with the Mourne Mountains filling the southern skyline on clear days. The town is built around three hills: the cathedral hill, the Mound of Down, and the ridge carrying English Street and the old county buildings.

The story behind it. The place has been a centre of power for well over two thousand years. The Mound of Down, a huge oval earthwork on the marsh edge, began as an Iron Age or early medieval royal enclosure of the Dál Fiatach and was remodelled by the Anglo-Normans into a motte and bailey. On the hill above, an early monastery became the seat of the medieval diocese, and John de Courcy, who took eastern Ulster in 1177, rebranded the church around the relics of Saint Patrick — he is said to have translated the bones of Patrick, Brigid and Columba to the cathedral, an act of religious politics that fixed the town's identity for good. The medieval cathedral was ruinous by the sixteenth century and was rebuilt between 1790 and 1818, incorporating the surviving choir and a set of remarkable box pews. In the churchyard, a rough granite slab carved simply with the name PATRIC was placed in 1900 to mark the reputed grave; it is a Victorian marker over a much older tradition, not a medieval monument, and the honest version of the story is the more interesting one.

What you actually see today. Down Cathedral crowns the hill, its interior an unusually complete Georgian ensemble of galleries, pews and a fine organ case. Below it, the Saint Patrick Centre gives an exhibition treatment to the historical Patrick and his own writings. Down County Museum occupies the eighteenth-century county gaol on the same hill, with the cell blocks preserved and a collection covering the Lecale district from prehistory to the linen age. English Street and Irish Street retain rows of Georgian frontages. On the northern edge of town the Downpatrick and County Down Railway runs restored steam and diesel trains on a short length of the old Belfast and County Down line, out toward the Inch Abbey halt and the Quoile, operating on selected weekends and holidays.

On screen. Downpatrick is the practical base for the Game of Thrones locations of the Lecale district, and one of them is barely two kilometres out of town. Inch Abbey, on the far bank of the Quoile, is where Robb Stark was proclaimed King in the North at the end of the first season, and the abbey ruin appears behind the Stark camp. The steam railway's Inch Abbey platform makes it possible, on operating days, to arrive at the location by train. Castle Ward, whose farmyard courtyard played Winterfell, is eleven kilometres east on the A25; Audley's Castle and Audley's Field are a little beyond it. The town itself was not filmed, and no production dressed its streets; its role in a screen-tourism itinerary is as the hub with the beds, restaurants and the museum context that the sites themselves lack.

The Patrick landscape around it. The town anchors a cluster of sites tied to the saint, all within a short drive and all quieter than the cathedral. Saul, three kilometres north-east, is traditionally where Patrick founded his first church in a barn given by the local chieftain Dichu; the small memorial church with its round tower there dates from 1932. On the hill above, a ten-metre granite statue of Patrick, erected the same year, looks out over Strangford Lough. Struell Wells, two kilometres east, is a walled enclosure of stone bathing houses and a ruined chapel around springs used for ritual bathing into the nineteenth century.

Getting there and timing. Frequent Ulsterbus services connect Downpatrick with Belfast in roughly an hour; there is no scheduled passenger rail link, the heritage line being just under two kilometres long. Driving from Belfast takes about fifty minutes, and the town has several free and paid car parks. The cathedral, museum and Saint Patrick Centre are all within a ten-minute walk of each other but the hill is genuinely steep, and wheelchair users will find the cathedral approach and some museum floors difficult, though the Saint Patrick Centre is fully accessible. Mid-March brings the Saint Patrick's Day festival, when the town holds a cross-community parade and the cathedral hill is at its busiest. Summer suits the railway and the surrounding beaches at Ballyhornan and Tyrella; autumn brings wildfowl to the Quoile Pondage reserve on the town's northern edge, where the former tidal estuary was cut off by flood barriers in 1957 and turned into a freshwater refuge.