Day 11

We had a leisurely start to ensure that we didn’t arrive at the new site, a hundred miles or so to the north,  before check in time. This saw us skirting Belfast, passing a sculpture called The Rise aka ‘The Balls on the Falls’. The journey was lengthened by lanes being blocked by broken down vehicles and accidents but we arrived safely and settled on to our pitch. The River Bann is behind us but the pitch is slightly marred by being opposite the toilet block/café, so rather busier than we’d like.

A visit to a nearby supermarket to collect supplies followed.

Day 12

Not quite such an early start but, taking into account past journeys, we allowed plenty of time to reach the Giant’s Causeway, so we didn’t miss our allocated entry slot and this time we were early. Our tour guide was Mark, another wonderful raconteur, who managed to successfully walk backwards for part of the route, so he was facing us, without bumping in to the many tourists. The Causeway gets tourists from 175 different countries each year and had nearly a million visitors a year pre-Covid.

The formation of the causeway, another World Heritage Site (two in three days), began 65 million years ago, when the tectonic plates drifted apart and lava bubbled up through the fissures and solidified. Further volcanic activity over millennia created the causeway. There are over 40,000 basalt columns and contrary to common belief, only about half are hexagonal. The others are mostly pentagons and septagons but they range from triangles to one single nonagon, whose location is secret. There used to be another 20,000 columns but these were quarried in the years before the site was protected. Tourists first became aware of the site when it was written about in 1692. In 1739, Susanna Drury painted a series of pictures of the causeway, which won a competition and this greatly increased the interest in the site.

The site is also home to various flora and fauna, including the narrow-mouthed whorl snail, which is unique to only three places and is the size of a grain of sand. The population has to be counted annually. This is done by sampling metre squares. Here you can find fulmars, oyster catchers, otters and stoats. Our haul was a heron and some female eider ducks.

Kelp is farmed in the area but 300 years of salmon fishing declined with the fish stocks and the last commercial salmon fisherman gave up in 2002, by which time the annual catch was about 300 fish a year; this had once been the daily catch.

We were treated to some ‘imaginative’ legends of the giant Finn McCool, credited with forming the causeway. We saw the rock formations known as Humphrey the camel, Finn’s boot, the organ pipes and the chimneys. After Mark left us, we continued to walk round to the next bay before returning to scramble across the causeway itself. There are three causeways of different sizes. I was a bit doubtful of my ability to rock climb safely; varifocals make this sort of thing difficult, so I was pleased to accomplish this without incident but definitely not recommended for those with mobility problems.

After leaving the Causeway we drive round the coast a short way to Portrush before returning to the van.

Day 13

We drove out to look at Lough Neagh. This is not held out to be much of a tourist attraction but we felt we should see the largest lake in the United Kingdom and in the island of Ireland. We viewed it from the west. It is a lake. It is large. That’s about it really. We later learned of the serious pollution problems in the Lough. There are issues with blue-green algae but additional pollution has put it in danger of becoming a dead lake.

We then headed for the Sperrin Mountains, designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. We did find our way to the edges of them; yes, beautiful, if not outstanding. Then the sat-nav slightly let us down. We were supposed to end up at a visitors’ centre in the Sperrin Mountains. Owing, we think, to the fact that Ireland seems to have many duplicate place names we ended up driving through the outskirts of Derry, that we were trying to avoid and in the middle of a housing estate. The next plan was to head to a National Trust property on the coast. Again this did not go well. We did have a pleasant drive along the Causeway Coast Road but the only National Trust property wasn’t quite where the sat-nav said it would be and was closed. We decided to call it a day. On the plus side, it was finally a little cooler and less humid, with a few showers.