Our B&B was “interesting” – as many rooms as possible crammed into the house and we were in “bijou” spaces up on the third and fourth floors. Today was Helena’s second, and last day with us as we walked to Carnlough.

We started out from Larne by passing the Chaine Memorial Tower – a memorial to James Chaine, MP for Antrim (died 1885), who developed Larne’s short sea route to Scotland as well as establishing the town as a transatlantic port. Boston’s long standing Scots-Irish roots can be traced to Larne – the town is documented as being the first in county Antrim to be taken by United Irishmen during the ill-fated rebellion of 1798. The Protestant rebels from this area (almost entirely Presbyterian) filled Larne and engaged the government forces around 2am on the morning of 7 June. We watched the ferry from Stranraer arrive and then headed out along the coast road, enjoying the dry weather and a new beach around every turn.

We carried on the road into Ballygally, keeping close to the coast the whole way. There were multitudes of seabirds (and ducks) populating the beaches – the oystercatchers were by far the noisiest. Ballygally Castle overlooks the sea at the head of Ballygally Bay. Now run as a hotel, it is the only 17th century building still used as a residence in Northern Ireland, and is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in all of Ulster.

The coast road continued to impress with the addition of some impressive cliffs on the land side as well as the non stop beaches. We got to Glenarm after a few flurries of rain (the put coat on, take coat off, swear, put coat on / off again type) and got ice creams from a little van in the car park – the syrups were of a decidedly fluorescent hue. There has been a castle at Glenarm since the 13th century, where it resides at the heart of one of Northern Ireland’s oldest estates The present castle was built by Sir Randal MacDonnell, 1st Earl of Antrim, in 1636, and it has remained in the family since its construction. It is currently owned by Randal McDonnell, 10th Earl of Antrim.

Walking around the last headland of the day we has some nice views of Glenarm behind us and Carnlough ahead of us. A relatively short day but I think the exertions of yesterday were still weighing on us as we were definitely quite tired got tea and scones while waiting for checkin time at our hotel. Tomorrow is an even shorter day as we head to Cushendall.

The hotel last night was pretty good – interesting to compare the prices / standards of accommodation as we move across the country – dearer does not always mean better. We had Helena and Hugh joining us for the longest walking day. The forecast was no rain and sunny spells along the whole route.

Established as an English settlement early in the 17th century, Belfast’s growth was driven by an influx of Scottish-descendant Presbyterians. Their disaffection with Ireland’s Anglican establishment contributed to the rebellion of 1798, and to the union with Great Britian in 1800 — later regarded as a key to the town’s industrial transformation. When granted city status in 1888, Belfast was the world’s largest centre of linen manufacture, and by the 1900s her shipyards were building up to a quarter of total United Kingdom tonnage. We walked northwards through the city, past a long queue for an anime convention at Queens University and then caught a glimpse of Belfast Cathedral as we headed back into the docks, past a noisy trio of baby gulls annoying their parent.

We then had a nice walk through Giant’s Park where we could see occasional glimpses of Belfast Castle. The path in the park ran along side the busy M2 and continued that way as we walked along the shoreline. As we got to Hazelbank Park we could see rain falling on the opposite side of the lough and, trusting the forecast, thought we would keep dry.

Then the heavens opened and the temperature really dropped. For about an hour and a half the rain was relentless and rendered the views of the lough meaningless. The rain was so heavy that the roadside drains couldn’t cope meaning passing cars had no alternative but to shower us as they passed by. A pretty miserable, wet and cold trudge into Carrickfergus where the rain mercifully stopped. A stop for a hot lunch and hot drink was very welcome.

The walk out of Carrickfergus was an unexpected hill, just what we needed with sodden shoes/socks and a full stomach! But sun was making an appearance and the views from the top were spectacular. The road also was very quiet which made a welcome change from the busy roads earlier.

Now the weather was behaving as per the forecast and actually felt like a summer day for the first time on this trip. The rolling country side made for some lovely viewing and the sheep and lambs in the fields were enjoying the warmth. We climbed a few hills, including an extra one due to a navigational error, and enjoyed a very welcome ice cream from a farm shop in the middle of nowhere as we then made the long descent into Larne and checked into our B&B. A very long a tiring day and after, hopefully, a good rest we head to Carnlough tomorrow.

The B&B was very nice with a very good breakfast this morning. The forecast was for a reasonably clear day so we set off on our walk to Belfast with raincoats stowed in backpacks.

Bangor has a long and varied history, from the Bronze Age people whose swords were discovered in 1949, to the Victorian pleasure seekers who travelled on the new railway from Belfast to take in the sea air. The city has been the site of a Gaelic Irish monastery renowned throughout Europe for its learning and scholarship, the victim of violent Viking raids in the 8th and 9th centuries, and the new home of Scottish and English planters during the Plantation of Ulster. We decided that today we would walk as much of the coast path (The Ulster Way) as possible and we joined the path just outside the Bangor Marina. There were new beaches to see every few hundred metres, some sandy and some quite rocky.

More beaches, nice views of the water through the trees, a walk on the beach at Helen’s Bay and sight of Grey Point Fort. This is a battery that was part of the defences of Belfast. Construction of the battery began in 1904, with the guns mounted by 1907 (and another battery on the opposite side of the Lough at Kilroot). The battery was armed with two 6-inch Mark VII Breech loading guns. During the First World War additional buildings were constructed to provide accommodation for men of Kitchener’s Army. During the Second World War During the Second World War concrete overhead covers were added to both gun positions. Following the war. the battery continued to be maintained with a mobile radar being installed in 1954 until disarmed in 1956.

As we continued towards Belfast on the coast path there were plenty of seagulls dropping molluscs from a height to break open their shells. We saw the ferry leaving from Belfast port, the Royal Northern Ireland Yacht Club, wind turbine blades ready for shipment (they are huge!) and a Celebrity Cruise Line (I think all the passengers were at the Titanic Exhibition. As we finished walking through the dockland there was a large ship (the SeaRose) in for a £61m refit.

As we were too early check in to our hotel we paid a visit to the Titanic Exhibition. It was interesting to see the history of Belfast ship building as well as, obviously, the building of the Titanic which even included a small theme park type ride (but very sedate). The actual hitting an iceberg and sinking was such a catalogue of avoidable errors but the one that stood out for me was the Captain, despite knowing there was ice in the area, refusing to reduce speed in the belief they could stop in time. The iceberg was spotted 1/4 mile away – the Titanic at full speed needed 1/2 mile to stop.

Just as we got to the city centre the heavens opened (literally!) and also treated us to a hail storm. We had to shelter in a nearby doorway until it passed – shortly afterwards warm sun and blue skies! Tomorrow we will have Helena and Hugh walking with us as we head up to Larne.

The pub for last night was very nice, food was good, room comfortable and service really friendly. Today was forecast to be extremely wet and windy so it was fortuitous that todays walk would be a short one from Donaghadee to Bangor.

The rain hadn’t started by the time Helen picked up our bags and we set off along the coast, but the skies did look dark and ominous. Donaghadee was used in the 1759–1826 period by couples going to Portpatrick in Scotland to marry, as there was a daily packet boat. During this period, Portpatrick was known as the “Gretna Green for Ireland”. The castle pictured is the Motte or Moat, originally a motte-and-bailey castle built by the Anglo-Normans in the late 12th century. The folly or castle on top of the motte was built by Daniel Delacherois in the early 19th century. It was used for storing the gunpowder, used for blasting, when the new harbour was being built between 1821 and 1834. Today it is part of a park, giving views across the town and seawards towards the Copeland Islands.

Now the rain was falling as we walked towards Groomsport, just about seeing Copeland Island before it disappeared in the gloom. We spotted a couple of hardy souls just heading out into the bay for a swim!

Having got to Groomsport we decided that, despite the weather, it would be more enjoyable to walk the actual coast path rather than remaining on the road. This proved to be a good choice as we were able to walk on nearly all of the Ballyholme beach where the row of houses on the promenade reminded me of the children’s TV program called Balamory. It was still raining at this stage as we exited the beach and headed for a coffee and soup for lunch – due to the short walk we had to kill time before we could checkin to our B&B. Tomorrow we head to Belfast in hopefully better weather.

Our hotel in Newtownards was perfectly serviceable even if it wasn’t in the most scenic of locations – the view from my bedroom window was a wall about 1 foot away!. We had walked up to Ballywalter on the coast yesterday and then Helen picked us up and took us to Newtownards for the night. Today we would walk back to Ballywalter and then up to Donaghadee. During the Great Famine, which resulted from the dependence of small tenants and cottiers on a blighted potato crop, the largest Newtownards local landowner, Lord Londonderry, rejected rent reductions on grounds of “personal inconvenience”. By 1847 the 800 inhabitants of the town were witness to “emaciated and half-famished souls” queuing at soup kitchens and overflowing the newly built workhouse. Despite Lord Londonderry’s objection, with the upgrading of the road to Donaghadee, several public works programs for famine relief were instigated.

Walking eastwards out through Newtownards there was an extensive array of plaques and murals showing the local affiliation. The tower in the last picture is the Scrabo Tower, a 135 feet (41 m) high 19th-century lookout tower or folly that stands on Scrabo Hill. It provides wide views and is a landmark that can be seen from afar – we saw it from Portaferry (16 miles / 25 km away). It was built as a memorial to Charles Vane 3rd, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry and was originally known as the Londonderry Monument.

As we finished our cross country jaunt we came back to Ballywalter and could see the sea again with the Belfast / Isle of Man or Liverpool ferry also visible. The Scrabo Tower was still visible also in an area dominated by rolling fields and large farm buildings. King Billy got quite a few mentions on walls as well – also called William of Orange because he was from Orange in the Dutch Republic. He married his cousin Mary, which later gave him a claim to the English crown where he became King William III of England.

The walk from Ballywalter up to Donaghadee was right beside the sea for the most part and we took advantage of some softer underfoot terrain by walking on the beach when possible. As one stage we did have to race the incoming tide to make sure we could get to a handy exit spot from the beach!

Arriving on Donaghadee the wind was calm and the sun was (sort of) out, so we wandered up to the top of the harbour with some nice views back to the pretty town and of the lighthouse. The bottom left picture shows the route of the North Channel swim, it typically starts at Donaghadee and finishes on Scotland’s Rhins of Galloway – a minimum distance of 34.5 km (21.4 miles). The World Open Water Swimming Association notes that the North Channel is part of the Ocean’s Seven series. This is a set of seven long-distance open-water swims considered the marathon swimming equivalent of the Seven Summits mountaineering challenge. No ice cream today as the opportunity for a Guinness / beer in the sunshine was too good to be missed.

Tomorrow promises to be a very wet and windy day as we walk (a thankfully shorter route) to Bangor.

The guest house in Portaferry was another strange place. Apparently closed but still taking bookings. It was clean and comfortable enough so no complaints. Portaferry played quite a part in the Irish linen industry. Many of the women in the town were employed to embroider handkerchiefs for Thomas Somerset and Co., one of the major linen companies in Ireland. The company realised that the women were more productive in the summer due to the light, so installed the first electric light outside of Belfast in Ulster. Each house with a working woman was given one light fitting and bulb. There was also a bus service introduced to bring more women from the Ards Peninsula to Portaferry to work in the factory that Somerset built.

We had originally planned to walk along the shores of Strangford Lough to Newtownards but a recce earlier in the week showed the road to be potentially very dangerous so we had a change of plan. We headed south from Portaferry along the loch shore along a nice quiet road with good views of the loch.

Continuing down around the bottom of the Ards Peninsula, the tide was out (it runs at 4 m/s in the channel!) we came upon an abandoned red phone box – the phone os still present inside, smothered in weeds. Rumour has its that if you use your credit card then the phone still works.

You will need the sound up for this. We passed by a herd of young bullocks and played then some Bach. They seemed fascinated !

We passed by Quintin Castle which has been extensively refurbished and changed hands most recently in late 2006. The latest owner had trouble with upkeep, in particular paying of renovation works, forcing the castle into the hands of administrators in 2012. In June 2013 Quintin Castle was sold (asking £1.65m with 22 acres) by NAMA to the Tayto Group  (owned by the Hutchinson family’s Manderley Food Group), which in July 2016 applied for permission to use the Castle as an 8-bedroom private function venue for weddings, visiting customers, training and conferences. Then, after a nice walk on one of the sandy beached we passed the “stump”, or remains, of the Kearney Windmill before triggering the goose alarm in a nearby house – they made so much noise as we were taking a photo the old lady owner came out to see what was up!

It really was a lovely walk today, past so many lovely beaches – it was pity the wind was so strong and so cold. Nevertheless we managed another walk on a deserted beach (that’s Paul in the distance – he had to stop for a pee). We stopped to chat to a man laying out seaweed to dry on the breakwater. The seaweed is Dulse and has all kinds of therapeutic qualities – he sells it, dried, for £10 a pound bag at the weekend markets.

It felt very weird that the whole sea front, villages of Cloughy, Ringboy and Portavogie has no pubs, no cafes and no restaurants. There was, however a very old shipwreck on Portavogie beach, a seal in Portavogie harbour and finally a cafe where we stopped for a bit of lunch (walking into the headwind was very wearying). We took a quick photo at the easternmost point of Northern Ireland in Ballyhalbert and finished our days walking at Ballywalter and has a nice sit in the sun, with an ice cream, while waiting for Helen to pick us up and take us back to Newtownards for the start of tomorrows walk.

We stayed in a very nice B&B, although a bit strange as no-one on site – all keys in individual key boxes, bar was an honesty bar and breakfast was a sort of continental affair.

Our B&B was in Bryansford, rather than Newcastle itself, and the village has a successful Gaelic football team,  Bryansford GAC. The team has won the Ulster Senior Club Football Championship twice, in 1969 and 1970. They play their home matches in St. Patricks Park in the nearby town of Newcastle. Today promised a much better weather experience than yesterday although it was still cold enough to require jackets as we started out heading through the small village of Clough and on towards Downpatrick. A few cute lambs and a loopback to yesterdays mountains were the scenic highlights of the first part of the day.

Walking into Downpatrick we passed by the Downpatrick Racecourse. This is one of the two horse racing courses in Northern Ireland, (the other being Down Royal).  The first race meeting at Downpatrick was held in 1685 under the charter of James II of Englandwho issued letters patent creating The Royal Corporation of Horse Breeders in the County of Down. After a nice deli sandwich on Downpatrick for lunch we continued our progress towards the Strangford Ferry by passing through Saul. When St Patrick came to Ireland strong currents swept his boat from the Irish sea through the Strangford Lough Narrows and he landed at the Slaney River, near Downpatrick. The High King’s brother, Dichu, was quickly converted and gave him a barn or Sabhall in Gaelic, from which the name Saul derives. This became the first church in Ireland.

Just after Saul we passed by Ireland’s national monument to Saint Patrick. Slieve Patrick is a large hill in Lecale donated by the Hampton family for the erection of a National Monument. The statue on the top is the world’s largest statue of Saint Patrick, carved of Mourne Granite near Kilcoo the statue is unusual as it has a workman’s boot on one foot and a sandal on the other to commemorate the quarry men. From the top of the hill there are excellent views over Strangford Lough. You can also see Saul Church, the Isle of Man, and the Mull of Kintyre on a clear day.

The end of our second days walking came as we got to the ferry between Strangford and Portaferry on Strangford Lough. In 1611 James I granted land on either side of the Lough to Peirce Tumolton in order to maintain and crew a ferry boat. In 1835 a group of local people formed the “Portaferry and Strangford Steamboat Company” and commissioned the building of the Lady of the Lake, which was the first steam ferry in Ireland. There has been a ferry operating this route continuously since 1611. No ice cream today but second best as we sat down in the rare sunshine was a cup of tea and a cinnamon/apple scone.

Tomorrow we shall head up the east coast of the Ards peninsula.

Not sure what Paul is doing but we are off on our adventures again. This time we are going to walk the coast of Northern Ireland and, as the title says, we are doing it for the experience and not raising money for charity this time. As this is not for charity we don’t have the usual raft of helpers driving our bags from stop to stop, so Helen & Sue kindly offered to take on those duties – Helen helping for the first half.

We stayed overnight in Newry before starting off on our walk, the weather for the day did not look promising. The modern Irish name for Newry is An tIúr which means “the yew tree”. An tIúr is a shortening of Iúr Cinn Trá, “yew tree at the head of the strand”, which was formerly the most common Irish name for Newry.^[8] This relates to an apocryphal story that Saint Patrick planted a yew tree there in the 5th century.  A cathedral city, it is the episcopal seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dromore. In 2002, as part of the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II, Newry was granted city status.

We started off with a long descent down to the city, crossing the Newry River and the heading back up until we exited the city on the way to the Mourne Mountains . No rain yet but certainly overcast and pretty cold for June.

Some nice walking for a while, undulating roads, distant glimpses of the Mourne Mountains, pretty manicured gardens and the ever-inquisitive cows – it felt really good to back out walking again.

Our planned route took us past the Mourne Mountains, but, as we were feeling strong and the weather hadn’t turned yet, we took a diversion to see the Spelga Dam. This was quite a hike up into the hills, maybe not the best idea of the first day of walking. Who knew that Santa lived in Country Down – we didn’t take the time to go see him. The hillsides were awash with rhododendrons gone mad, providing some nice views on the way to the top of the hill. Spelga reservoir and dam were built as part of a project that had origins in the idea of supplying water to Belfast in 1894. The Spelga Reservoir itself was developed between 1953 and 1957. As part of the construction, the B27 road was rebuilt above the reservoir to replace the original road submerged by the construction. At the reservoir we took a quick lunch break and that was when the rain started.

The rain didn’t let up until we got to our B&B near Newcastle. The remainder of the days walk was downhill though, but not too steep thankfully. We stopped for an ice cream (in the rain) in Tollymore Forest Park – what doesn’t show is that within seconds of taking his first slurp, Paul’s ice cream deposited itself on the ground – thankfully the nice lady ion the kiosk replaced it without charge. Tollymore Forest Park was the first state forest park in Northern Ireland and was established on 2 June 1955. It covers an area of 630 hectares (1,600 acres) at the foot of the Mourne Mountains and has views of the surrounding mountains and the sea at nearby Newcastle. The Shimna flows through the park where it is crossed by 16 bridges, the earliest dating to 1726. 

Wet, and tired, we finally got to our B&B. Tomorrow we head for Portaferry.