Cooley Peninsula
— — a country older than the border.
Not only on a wall.
“A small peninsula on the east coast, with Carlingford Lough on one side and Dundalk Bay on the other, the Mourne Mountains rising across the water in another country. The Cooley Mountains run down the middle. The Brown Bull of Cooley was stolen from here in the oldest epic in the Irish language. Carlingford village is medieval: King John's Castle on the rock above the harbour, narrow lanes, oyster boats coming in on the tide. Walkers come for the Táin Way. Most stay a single afternoon and feel they have understated their visit.
Cooley Peninsula, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Cooley Peninsula juts east from County Louth on Ireland's northeast coast, framed by Carlingford Lough to the north and Dundalk Bay to the south. The peninsula is roughly 24 km long and rises sharply at its spine; Slieve Foye reaches 589 m at its summit, the highest point in the Cooley Mountains. Across the lough lie the Mourne Mountains of Northern Ireland. The medieval village of Carlingford anchors the northern shore; Greenore guards the eastern tip. The whole peninsula is part of the historical province of Ulster in early Irish geography, despite its modern administrative home in Leinster's County Louth.
King John's Castle stands on a rock above Carlingford harbour, built in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century to guard the entrance to the lough. The castle takes its name from a visit by King John of England in 1210. Inside the village, the Tholsel, once a medieval town gate, and the Mint, a fifteenth-century tower house, survive in the original street plan. The peninsula is also the setting of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, in which Queen Medb of Connacht invades Ulster to steal the Donn Cuailnge, the Brown Bull, from a chieftain named Dáire mac Fiachna. The young hero Cú Chulainn defends the ford alone.
Carlingford Lough is a glacial inlet carved during the last ice age. It opens between the Cooley Mountains on the southern shore and the Mourne Mountains on the northern, where Slieve Donard rises to 850 m. The lough has been known for its oysters since at least the medieval period, and both native and Pacific varieties are still farmed along the south shore. The water also forms an international boundary, with the Republic of Ireland to the south and Northern Ireland to the north. A small ferry crosses between Greenore and Greencastle in County Down, a fifteen-minute passage with mountains on both sides.