The beach
At the bend where Ardamine’s strand curves off Courtown’s South Beach, a bank of built-up sand sits just offshore. Waves break on it early and reach the shore already spent, leaving a shallow, stoneless pool that is genuinely safe for small children and nervous swimmers. That pool is the reason to choose Ardamine over the busier strand next door.
The sand runs long and flat, good for a walk with the dog if you keep it under control through July and August. One honest word on parking, because you will read otherwise: there is no proper car park at the sand. The beach is boxed in by holiday homes and private ground, so the sensible move is to leave the car up near the main road and walk down. Come before midday on a summer weekend and you will save yourself a slow crawl for a space.
The mound and the graveyard
At the edge of the cemetery just outside the village stands Árd Ladhran, a perfectly round mound that older maps mark as the Moat of Ardamine. Folklore hands it a remarkable tenant: the medieval Lebor Gabála, the Book of Invasions, names it as the grave of Ladhra, reckoned the first man to die in Ireland, forty days before Noah’s Ark set sail. It has never been excavated, and some think it may cover a passage tomb. Buried beside it is a faith healer, Fr William Webb, whose grave still draws quiet offerings.
The graveyard holds a rough, plain Latin cross, under a metre high and possibly twelfth-century, marking the parish’s old southern boundary and the site of an early church. St Aidan, first bishop of Ferns, is said to have come ashore near here around 600 AD on his way back from St David’s in Wales, though he built his first church a little inland at Kiltennel rather than at Ardamine itself. The most-visited grave belongs to Seán Etchingham, a figure in the 1916 Rising and a member of the First Dáil, who died at Courtown Harbour in 1923 and is buried here.
St John’s church
St John the Evangelist, consecrated in 1862, is the work of George Edmund Street, the Gothic Revival architect better known for Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral. He built it as a memorial to the Richards family, in rock-faced ‘Opus Incertum’ stone dressed with pale green Knockavocka stone. The Richards had taken the estate in 1818, when the surgeon Solomon Richards reputedly bought it with a £10,000 lottery win. Their demesne house is gone: the IRA burned it in July 1921, during the War of Independence, and it was never rebuilt. The church and its graveyard are what the estate left behind.
Nearby
Courtown, a few minutes north, has the harbour and the Courtown Lifeboat Station, and Pirates Cove runs adventure golf, bumper boats and arcade games daily through the summer (check piratescove.ie for hours). The shoreline links into Courtown Woods for an easy coastal walk, with sea thrift and gorse on the banks and waders working the sandbanks in spring and autumn.
Getting there
Ardamine is an easy drive off the N11; the nearest railway station is Gorey, about 10 km north, with Dublin and Rosslare trains, and buses to Wexford town stop in Courtown. The coast is open to the wind, so bring a layer whatever the month. Time it for a weekday and you can have both the sandbank pool and Ladhra’s mound more or less to yourself.