Along this road, running along the river separating Northern Ireland from the Republic, on the 27th of August, 1979, a British Army convoy was ambushed by a guerilla attack of the IRA, while headed into the town of Warrenpoint, down towards the coast. As the lorry loads of British soldiers drove past a point in the road, a bomb was detonated by the IRA, destroying the one truck and pinning down the convoy. After a half hour when the troops were subjected to sniper fire, a chopper arrived with reinforcements and as these reinforcements were setting up a command post at a nearby gatehouse, a second bomb was detonated where the IRA had accurately predicted the reinforcements would be landing, killing twelve more British. In all, 18 British soldiers were killed in this attack, and the IRA column escaped unscathed. It goes down in the late history of The Troubles as being one of the most successful IRA ambushes, and while we were visiting this site, we were guided by Jim McAlistair, a reformed Sinn Feiner from South Armagh with IRA ties, who would have known the column of IRA volunteers who carried out this act.
View of County Down from the Cooley Mountains
One of the branches of Nelson ancestry, the McConnells, originally came from Saintfield, in County Down, in the late 1700's.
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