JUST as the sound of the North's Lambeg drums faded for another year, the banks of the River Boyne began throbbing with a beat of a different type. The Drogheda Samba Festival - subtitled The Bang By The Boyne - set hips swaying and feet stamping all weekend as more than 100 drummers filled streets, pubs and clubs with their sensual Brazilian rhythms.
The three day long "sambastic" event, which is now in its third year, culminated yesterday with an open air concert and a carnival parade through the town's bunting clad streets.
Seven bands from England, Scotland, Belfast, Dublin and Drogheda had the town pulsing from morning to night with drumming workshops, samba pub crawls and street sambas.
All day Saturday, the steps of St Peter's Church on West Street were turned into an open air stage with performances by musicians from the Drogheda School of Samba and the Leeds based band, Chocante.
Around mid afternoon, some 35 drummers led by Scottish samba artist, Erin Scrutton, beat out the powerful rhythms they had just created during a two hour, advanced drumming workshop in the Drogheda Arts Centre.
Even the glass case protecting the head of St Oliver Plunkett inside the church could not have shielded the martyr from the compulsive celebratory beat.
More than 50 actors from youth theatres in Newry, Drogheda, Balbriggan and Dundalk took turns to entertain the audience with street performances as part of the Streetwise Drama Festival which coincided with the samba festival.
BUT how has Drogheda - the site of Oliver Cromwell's best remembered Irish slaughter in 1649 and the 1690 Battle of the Boyne - come to re invent itself as the "Samba Capital of Ireland"?
According to one of the festival organisers, Kieran Gallagher, the samba beat began to take hold of the town in 1993 when a band called Macumba from Scotland held samba workshops there.
A small group of musicians subsequently formed a samba band which played in the town's St Patrick's Day Parade and the Notting Hill Carnival in London in 1994. They helped launch the Drogheda samba Festival that year as part of the Drogheda 800 celebrations.
"The first year people in the town were saying `what the hell is going on?'. The second year they were a bit more used to it. And now they love it," said Gallagher.
Gallagher is one of 14 members of the town's samba group, Ceol Batucada (Batucada meaning Brazilian samba drumming). The group, which describes its music as a mix of Irish traditional and samba, has just released its first album, A hAon.
And the Celtic samba tradition is continuing to grow, with the formation last January of the Drogheda School of Samba which has about 60 members. It's a cultural fusion which is certainly enlivening the town.
"We're trying to give Drogheda a bit of a buzz because sometimes the town gets a bad name for unemployment and being close to the Border," explained Gallagher.
"Here we are, a bunch of English musicians playing in Ireland a music which came from Brazil and can be traced back to Africa," said Chocante member Patrick Seldon. "It's certainly a post modern world."
