Beaches, Bolly buses and a big ship: A road trip from Belfast to Derry
Here’s what to see on a drive from Belfast to Derry
It’s a well-known secret, apparently: that Whiterocks Beach on Northern Ireland’s dramatic, wind-beaten Causeway Coast is one of the unofficial best in the world. The sand is floury-fine and as white as I’ve seen in Western Australia, with dog walkers and families messing about on its spread (but no sunbathers – even in the summer months, we’re not savages).
A woman walking a golden retriever stops to chat to us, to comment on the way my 16-month-old son is joyfully flinging himself into the sand, throwing big handfuls over his head.
“Why are you here?” She asks my small family, not unkindly. “Because you couldn’t go anywhere else?”
Well, erm, yes, actually. A week’s holiday was unluckily timed straight after the first, chaotic, green list announcement that dumped Portugal onto amber. I was hoping for a Greek island (Santorini, maybe, or Tinos) but instead got a different island: the one across the Irish Sea.
It seems an obvious point to make, but Northern Ireland, while still a part of the UK, is also an integral part of another island altogether – an issue that has exposed devastating fault lines in the ongoing Brexit negotiations. It’s not exactly a foreign land, but Northern Ireland’s cultural differences and historical texture make it feel more than a bit distinct from my life in England. It remained a part of the UK I had, to my shame, never taken the time to explore. I’d always wanted to drive from Northern Ireland’s capital Belfast along the coast to the second city Derry, and now seemed like as good a time as any: if you discount the ridiculous “sausage war” headlines that coincided with our trip, that is.
We landed into a stormy Belfast on the day a 30C heatwave was cooking London and set a course straight for the Europa hotel: a concrete monolith in the centre of town that holds the dubious honour of being the most bombed hotel in Europe, owing to attacks during The Troubles that took place from the 1960s to 1998. Today the Europa is an upmarket option run by Northern Ireland-owned Hastings Hotels, and this year is even more noteworthy as it celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Belfast is one of those cities that’s compact enough to manoeuvre around the big sights in a couple of days: the grand City Hall; the Linen Quarter, home to many of the city’s once-thriving linen manufacturing businesses turned fancy bars and restaurants; and the show-stopping Titanic Museum in the newly rejuvenated Titantic Quarter that sucks up real estate by the harbour.
The Titanic Museum is a first-class attraction, both in terms of visitor experience and the amount it cost (an eye-watering £77m, although it’s not hard to argue that post-Troubles Belfast needed some serious tourism dollar sinking into it). The museum guides visitors through Belfast’s ship-building past via shipyard Harland and Wolff – once the envy of Europe – and indulges in the tragic story of the Titanic, with interactive exhibits and an immersive cable car ride that soaks you in the sounds and sights of producing this 20th-century luxury liner. The museum today stands on the very location where the Titanic was designed and built; its four metallic “wings” centred by a glass cylinder make as impressive an entrance as I imagine the ship would have when she was launched from here in 1911.
Walking along the harbourfront’s self-styled Maritime Mile, salt licking at my hair, seagulls circling in a gunmetal sky, drizzle falling stubbornly, it’s hard to imagine the dazzle of the Titanic in this northern European city, where tatty Union Jacks hide down forgotten streets.
Until Line of Duty, naturally.
A century after Belfast’s finest work sank 2,000 metres into the northern Atlantic, it’s the BBC procedural police show thrusting Belfast into the limelight once again: the series is filmed in the city, although it’s vaguely hinted at that it’s set somewhere in the Midlands. With the finale still fresh(ish), I run into the dingy graffitied subway made famous by Kate and Steve’s clandestine meet-ups with more gusto than is perhaps necessary, and later spot the terracotta Belfast Central Library that doubles as the police headquarters. For hardcore fans, an official Line of Duty tour launches in August.
My last Belfast view, and perhaps the most enduring, was of the 8 metre-high, 800 metre-long concrete Peace Wall in west Belfast, which divides the unionists of Shankill Road and the nationalists of Falls Road. Today it’s daubed in graffiti and – depending on which side of the wall you’re on – images of Belfast’s industrial past or messages of support for oppressed regimes (I spotted “Free Palestine”). My only regret is that we drove along the walls too quickly, and didn’t take the time to learn about the history and context of the murals and the impact the walls have on daily life in Belfast: my colleague Simon Calder recommended Rory O’Kane for an excellent tour.
The walls that divide Belfast soon fall away for the wide-open coast towards Bangor, the original Northern Irish holiday resort. We’re not going that far, rather just a few miles into the Belfast Lough to the Culloden Resort & Spa in the nearby town of Holywood (which, for the record, shares very little DNA with its American cousin).
Gazing through a bay window in the Culloden’s drawing room towards the channel to the Irish Sea, which in a “normal” year would see cruise liners chugging in and out of Belfast, it’s hard to imagine any sort of divide could exist here. The hotel’s 12 acres of garden spill frictionlessly down to the water in the distance.
This grand hotel, built as a palace for the Bishops of Down, has styled itself as one of Northern Ireland’s finest country house hotels. (In reality, it’s just 9 miles from Belfast, so handily doubles up as a city stay too.) When we visited, its gardens had been given over to pieces of postmodern art and sculpture as part of the hotel’s summer art festival; a bus dispensing Bollinger was parked up on its groomed lawn next to the adjacent Cultra Inn. It does what fancy rural piles now do so well – striking the ideal balance between the modern touches and the lush carpet and stiff baroque manor chairs (popular with lounging Netflix stars filming in the area, I was told).
We soon swap Belfast Lough for the lake named after the village of Strangford in County Down: pencil-thin Strangford Lough, which, at 57 sq metres, is the UK’s largest inlet and a marine conservation zone. A leisurely drive anti-clockwise brings us to the eponymous village, where we hold tight to takeaway coffees from Little Wolf as seagulls look a bit too interested in what we’re clutching, and cross the tip of the lough on the tiny car ferry. Then we set our GPS for the Antrim coast and another Northern Irish great: the Giant’s Causeway.
We couldn’t come to Northern Ireland and not see the view that has decorated a thousand postcards. I’d worried that its omnipresence in Irish marketing materials and its drama rendered on screen would lessen its in-person impact. Happily, there are few things as life-affirming as standing on a handful of the 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, sucking in great mouthfuls of seawater as it licks above your head, blackening the rocks in the late afternoon sun. The attraction is owned by the National Trust, but – top tip – you don’t need to pay for entry; just wander behind the visitor centre and along the path. The excellent audio tour, which takes visitors through the myths and legends of the Causeway, is still well worth doing though.
It’s at the nearby Bushmills Inn, a fairytale boutique property in the thriving whiskey town of the same name, that we collapse gratefully that night, lungs full of fresh Causeway air. It’s a proper Irish place: low-hanging wooden beams, a cosy peat fire, nooks and crannies to hide in (including a secret library), and rooms (some with four-posters and claw-footed baths) named after whiskeys. On a warm summer’s day, everybody’s crowding outside on the patio with pints, swapping tales about days spent on the Causeway, wandering the distillery or golfing at Royal Portrush up the coast.
Our last few days in Northern Ireland are a slow haze of bouncing along gorgeous beaches on the Causeway Coast, including Whiterocks and Portstewart, and meandering inland to County Antrim’s best countryside. We’re not in a hurry to reach Derry, the bookend to our trip.
We cross the river Foyle and redeveloped waterfront area to pull into Derry’s walled city – the only still-standing walled city in Ireland – early on a Friday morning when the dew is still fresh on the grass. It’s along these ramparts that I walk with John from Martin McCrossan’s City Walls tour, a lively and unmissable window into Derry’s history. He moves from explaining the city’s modern incarnation (as seen in the wildly popular Derry Girls); to the history behind the unionist Fountain Estate and the nationalist Bogside on the other side of the city walls; to “Free Derry” corner, covered in murals of those lost during Bloody Sunday.
A scant few hours later, after crepes eaten off gingham tablecloths at the cutesy Craft Village, a reconstruction of a Victorian courtyard, I’m thrust into a very different side of Derry, through the medium of Friday night in the dining room at the smart Bishops Gate Hotel. A snapshot: Northern Ireland’s bright young things are sliding onto navy leather banquets, eyeing up framed prints of dogs in suits on the walls as the light filters through the big windows. The vibe is cosmopolitan and fun; both adjectives that wouldn’t have been used to describe divided Derry some two decades ago.
I muse to my Derry-based colleague that it’s hard to reconcile the city I saw at the Bishops Gate Hotel, all light and chatter, with the city that is still anointing its battle scars – in June, the trial of two soldiers involved in the Bloody Sunday massacre was halted. He shrugged, over Slack, and said: “Life goes on no matter what's happening, it's always had to be that way. But I think now there's much more life about the place and more to smile about.”
Well, exactly. Then I remembered the conversation I had with a woman in a bakery in Holywood, outside Belfast, who, after discovering we were visiting from London, beamed and gestured outside to the 15C drizzle. “You brought the fine London weather with you! Now, here’s your potato farls.”
Travel essentials
Staying there
Rooms at Bushmills Inn start from £170, B&B.
Rooms at the Europa Hotel Belfast start from £60, B&B.
Rooms at the Bishops Gate Hotel Derry start from £109, room-only.
Rooms at the Culloden Hotel & Spa start from €110 (£93), B&B.
Visiting there
For more information on organising a holiday to Northern Ireland, visit the official tourism board website.
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