While its beaches had already made it a popular spot, Courtown came into its own as a tourist resort in the 19th century, after the harbour had been built, when visitors would come from Dublin and the midlands to take in the sand and the sea.

The north end of the beach was reserved for female bathers only. A woman called Mrs Noctor kept a keen eye out for an intruding males. She would not have approved, then, of the antics of Claudia Bruckman, a German woman who, in the summer of June 2004, streaked naked through the streets near the harbour.

Drunk, moneyless and with no passport, she spent a night in Mountjoy before being flown back to Germany the next day.