We planned today to be a driving and touring day along the north coast of Ireland. Tomorrow will be in Belfast town itself. Wednesday isn’t decided, yet. I’ve been thinking we were leaving on Wednesday, but that isn’t correct! That gives us one more day here in fascinating Northern Ireland.
The north coast from Ballycastle to Portrush was our main destination. Once there the route is well marked. It is a narrow, winding road with a lot of tour busses, replete with numerous places to stop.
Sometimes Google Maps frustrates me to no end. I put our destination as Ballycastle and it gave me a route and two alternates. I selected the alternate route. I didn’t push “start” for about 5 minutes while we arranged things in the car. Then it sent me up the original route, not the one I selected. It worked out OK as it turned out we needed as much time as we could get! We didn’t get back to our B&B until after 8pm.
Our first stop was in Ballycastle … where there isn’t a castle any more. A nice Anglican Church sits on the site of the old castle. It’s interesting to me that the Catholic and Anglican (Church of Ireland) buildings are always open from early morning until late evening. The Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches are not open except when they’re having services.
The Holy Trinity Church in Ballycastle was a nice stop. We were able to find a parking place right in front of the building. The sanctuary had a very small pipe organ.
Our next stop was in Ballintoy at a small Anglican church perched on the edge of a cliff.
Almost all Anglican Churches over here have a tower with 4 spikey corners making them fairly easy to recognize. After a couple of photo opportunities along the way, our next stop was the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was definitely worth the stop.
Huge columns of rock stacked together as though they had been poured out in tubes. Many of these columns were 40-50 feet tall above the ground and another 50-100 feet below the ground. Ancient Irish folklore has these pillars set in place by a giant named Finn. The giant Finn had a wife and one son. This was their playground.
We passed some castle ruins and then stopped at Dunluce Castle. This was very interesting. The original wood castle was built in the 1100’s. Added upon and enlarged as various clans forced the previous occupants out and clamined it for their own, the castle reached it’s peak in the 1600’s. But then, because there was no port and the large ships couldn’t dock, the castle and associated village fell into disuse as people moved away.
The coastline is breath-takingly beautiful. This is the area where quite a bit of the TV series “Game of Thrones” was filmed.
From Dunluce we continued down the coast and eventually into Londonderry. By then it was pretty dark. We stopped at the Catholic cathedral and stepped inside.
It was raining as we arrived in Londonderry as well. This is the only walled town in Ireland and we drove through the walls several times trying to figure out how to get to the cathedral. As we got into the city center I lost cell service and thus Google Maps stopped working.
Belfast and our hotel were about an hour and a half southeast of Londonderry. When we got back to the area where our B&B is located, we stopped at a Pizza Hut Delivery location, ordered two personal pan pizzas, and had dinner in our room.
Tomorrow we’ll take a Black Taxi tour of Belfast. Should be interesting as the tour focuses on the “troubles”.