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.