9–19 August: The Vales of Antrim
After our adventures in Shetland, we were ready to meet up with Carolyn, Allan, Claire and Ben in Belfast, as planned; but first, we had to adventure the North Sea again. This time the recent gales had whipped up a bit of a ground swell. It was hardly the level of a winter storm, but once we turned out beyond the lighthouse, carrying a drink from the bar become a little more adventurous and we needed no one to rock us to sleep!
We were better prepared for the mysteries of Aberdeen on the return journey. The bus takes you to the terminal, but the train goes to the opposite side — surely a relic of the days as an RAF base!. The airport is basic, of course, like Belfast, so we walked out to an Embraer that looked like someone billionaire’s spare biz jet. We had to return to the gate to fix a fault (fuel flow valve!) but got into George Best Airport in time and with both engines still running
The rendezvous point with Claire, Ben, Carolyn and Allan was the Titanic Hotel, the renovated design offices of Harland and Wolf. The bar and the restaurant are in old lofting rooms, with huge skylights, while the rooms are large and comfortable. We had a great meet up and walked over to dinner at White’s, a local pub which promised live music, and delivered quality food and brilliant song. We had a singer/guitarist who could perform everything from Irish traditional to Rolling Stones. The food was a little slow, but worth the wait, and we had plenty to occupy us. It was the perfect introduction to our walk.
Wednesday’s weather looked a bit iffy (a theme for the remainder of this entry), but we didn’t need to travel to our first stop at Cushendall until after noon, so Caz and Al went shopping and the rest of us waited and then set out on foot for Lanyon Station, which was about twenty minutes walk away. With the same vengeance that directed the iceberg towards the Titanic, the heavens opened!
Nevertheless, we found out way by train and bus to Cushendall, a very pretty town by the sea that seemed to be more Catholic than Protestant (the C of I church was large, as was the Catholic, but the Presbyterian church was boarded up). The Meadows was a little old, but comfy, and we soon settled in before Paula and I went for a walk and realised how spectacular the scenery was: the town lay at the foot of a glen or vale that was spectacular. This was to be the site for our walk the following day.
We enjoyed the first of an excellent series of dinners (at Harry’s) before a good night’s sleep. Breakfast was delicious, even though our rather elderly host was carrying a leg injury, and we were transported in shifts to our starting point, the entrance to Glenarriff Park, 15 km up the Vale. Very soon into the walk we were able to see the Inner Hebrides and Scotland on the horizon, across what the guide notes said was the Sea of Moyle but I think of as the North Channel. Glasgow was somewhere to the East. The whole of this part of Ireland is the Moyle Coast, and I’ve realised that one of the Guinness hereditary title is the Barony of Moyle. (The other title is the Earldom of Iveigh).
It was a magnificent day. Initially we climbed above the road to get a view down the Vale, but after lunch we were descending beside the river until we reached the sea. All the while we had picture book views of the sea and the distant islands. After some early showers, the weather cleared to a warm and sunny afternoon. It was one of the best days for walking we have experienced.
While both England and Scotland have great paths, we found that this walk was special. There were few sections of great difficulty, and we weren’t trying to break records. None of us were at peak fitness and there were many conversations to be had, so sometimes our pace could be infuriatingly slow, but there was something different to be seen every few metres and phones and cameras to wrangle in capturing the moment.
It wasn’t all a picnic, although we had to improvise one for the second day of the walk. It was quite a thing to see the production line around the breakfast table! Just as well we did as the track was remote and, for at least the first three hours, a bit on the swampy side! We walked through an old forestry plantation where the moss underfoot made it feel like scuba diving in porridge, along paths ankle deep in mud when it wasn’t water, and then had a steep climb through gorse and bracken because some farmer refused to grant a right of way across his land.
The end of our second day of walking found us in Ballycastle, a much bigger town than Cushendall. We spent Friday and Saturday night in possibly the best B and B we’ve found, An Caislean, two converted terraces turned into a large affair lots of seating areas, complete with coffee machines and even a kitchen. Our hosts were Berkeley and Claire, who even offered to do a load of washing in return for a donation to a local charity. Dinner on Friday night was at the Anzac Bar, given that name by the original owner who had met Anzacs at Gallipoli (so the story goes). We had a superb meal in a great town.
Saturday’s walk was a circuit around Rathlin Island, a forty minute ferry trip to the east of the town. Once again we were to experience 12 months of weather in a few hours! The island is only a few kilometres from the Mull of Kintyre, close enough to hear McCartney’s echoes, and has a population of a couple of hundred. It has an interesting history, including being the site of the first Viking raid in Ulster, a place of clan massacres among Scots, a kelp farm owned by the local Church of Ireland minister, and the site of many shipwrecks. It has three lighthouses, as it shaped like a boot and sits across two shipping channels. We walked to the southern end and discovered tons of sheep shit, lots of birds and – to our surprise – seals swimming and basking in the rocky bays. Like much of Antrim, it is still unspoiled, in spite of bus loads of cruise ship inmates and Game of Thrones fans, saved by the lack of development away from the string of golf courses along the vale’s and coast.
Another great meal at a new and upcoming restaurant (The Cellar) followed, and the next day we set out on a modified route. Our original twenty kilometre path had been compromised by fallen trees from recent storms, and the alternative took us along busy roads, so Berkeley suggested taking a taxi about fifteen kms up the coast to Dunseverick Castle and then walking back along the coast route to Ballintoy.
This seemed a fabulous plan, although for the first time there was more grey than blue in the sky. The photos show that we were feeling a little chilly, but the coast was as spectacular as the vales. Things got a little more complicated when we had to scramble around the headlands. The tide was in, the sand was gone and the only way down to Whitepark Bay Beach was scrambling over the rocks under the headland near Portbraddon. The beach was fantastic — until we got to the southern end. Ulster has few rights of way, so most of the paths are on Crown Land or are negotiated permissive paths, but the farmer who owned the land above the beach was clearly of the opinion that walkers were not welcome. Getting off the beach and around to Ballintoy involved climbing around the cliff and then scrambling down a steep slope, mostly on our backsides. Had we done it the other way around it would have been OK, but it wasn’t really what we had signed up for, so getting past that 10 metre drop was a relief.
Ballintoy is just a village, but we realised that we had eaten in one of the pubs two years before when we had taken our Game of Thrones bus trips… so we went to the other pub for a late lunch. After checking in to the B and B, we eventually had a reunion with the Fullerton Arms. We disappointed the hosts because none of us order any of their famous mussels, but it was another good feed. We hoped for an easier walk on Monday morning, because we were off to the Giant’s Causeway!
The bus took as back to the ruins of Dunseverick (it was never a castle, but probably a god-forsaken watchtower for the least popular soldiers), and we walked more east than north to the Giant’s Causeway. The wind had turned into a westerly gale, so it felt like we were being pushed closer to the cliff edge. As picturesque as the view was, we had not desire to be seeing it from the wrong angle!
As we got closer to the Causeway, we started to encounter guided walks and tourists, which was strange as we had not seen any at all on previous days. While there were nowhere near as many people at the Visitors’ Centre and down at the rocks as we saw last time, it was still busy; but we managed to get a light lunch at The Nook, the old hotel at the top of the cliff. This was enough fuel to walk down the hill to share the view with busloads of tourists from all over the world.
To make up for the wind and occasional showers, we stayed in a very comfortable hotel (Grays) outside Bushmills and had a really great night. Paula and I discovered that the whole shebang was being run a very nice 20-year old woman, but thing worked like clockwork, so we were pretty impressed.
For our final day of walking, we once again edited our plans, as the first hour was walking back to the coast along the road from Bushmills and then back along the cliffs. We were happy to cut a risky and repetitive loop from the day and catch the bus to Dunluce Castle.
The history of the place is fascinating, as it was the site of protracted conflict between the McQuillon clan and the MacDonnells (MacDonalds from the Isles. The latter swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I and armed the castle with cannon salvaged from a wrecked Armada galleon. What you see if the quite luxurious home of the Earl of Antrim and his wife, a Villiers; but the whole site was abandoned after the Battle of the Boyne and the MacDonnell seat is now at Glenarm. Dunluce remains imposing and it’s no wonder that it was used as a location of Game of Thrones.
The rest of the walk might well have been a tour of the local golf links, because Portrush and Portstewart are perfect locations and the Open was held here this year. The walk along the beach was good fun, although we wondered at the whether the few swimmers on an unpatrolled beach in autumn were brave or mad. We walked around Portrush and along its promenades, which was the largest built up area we had experienced, and along the coast to our final stop in Portstewart. It is one of the those strange things that the last day of a walk is often anticlimactic because destinations are often in towns finish on pavements — that was certainly the case with Camino, West Highland Way and the Hadrian’s Wall Walk. But we had enjoyed the walk immensely, especially as we don’t get a lot of time to spend together.
We were all at the station the next morning to go our separate ways: Paula and I to travel to Belfast before a long series of flights back to Sydney; Carolyn, Allan, Claire and Ben to go to Derry before Ben and Claire flew home and Caz and Al travelled to Italy. Paula and I had five weeks of new experiences and I will probably take another post to evaluate things and record some lessons for future trips. We arrived home very tired from four flights that started in Ireland, happy to be home but carrying some great memories.
The next post has the GPX tracks and a screen shot of the photo locations (ain’t technology a marvellous indulgence!).
My photo gallery which has processed photos from the walk is at https://iscaonline.net/gallery/index.php?/category/264
