TWO VANS ROLL INTO THE NORTH …
To a soundtrack of Van Morrison and the drumming of rain on the roof, Gail Simmons ticks off Northern Ireland’s top sights on a camper-van tour
‘AT least it’s fine between the showers,” said our fellow bystander, cheerily. We were huddling beneath the Shipquay Gate, which pierces Derry’s stout stone bastions, sheltering from a sudden downpour. Meanwhile, splinters of sunshine pierced the clouds, turning the stone a rich gold.
Only in Ireland, it seems, can it bucket down and brighten up simultaneously. And perhaps only in Derry — a city that has seen more than its fair share of troubles over the past three centuries — do you hear such optimism expressed with buoyant regularity.
We were part-way through a walking tour around the 17th-century walls, which encircle the city. These walls, still bristling with 24 of their original cannons, remained unbreached during the siege of 1689, when the Jacobite army assailed the city for three months — an event still controversially commemorated each August by the Apprentice Boys.
From our entertaining guide, John McNulty, we learnt that Derry’s history stretches way back to the sixth century, when it was called Daire (“oak grove”) before becoming a “plantation town”, fortified to protect Scottish and English settlers, and renamed Londonderry.
This year, the city has been celebrating its selection as City of Culture 2013, and in pragmatic Irish fashion embracing both names, Derry and Londonderry, under the slogan “Let it be LegenDerry”.
But despite the optimism, McNulty didn’t shy from more recent history as he pointed out, beyond the walls, areas infamous from ’70s news reports: districts such as the Bogside, where you can still see gigantic, gable-end political murals.
While McNulty’s stories gave a unique insight into the divisions Derry suffered, they also revealed a growing confidence in the future. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, investment has flowed into the city. The grid-plan streets and St Columb’s Cathedral have been restored, arts venues and cafés are blooming and hope is in the air.
Later we found ourselves traversing a slender curve of steel, the new Peace Bridge across the River Foyle, linking the largely Nationalist Cityside area with the largely Unionist Waterside. It also joins the walled city with Ebrington Barracks, built in the 19th century to house the British Army and now hosting some key City of Culture 2013 events. As dusk fell and we strolled back to our hotel, the bridge was under-lit with soft lilac illuminations, reflected in the still waters of the Foyle.
We were visiting Londonderry as part of an Ulster tour, travelling around the province in a camper van, alternating city-hotel stays with remote and peaceful campsites. Arriving first at Larne, we’d headed north along the Antrim coast on the Causeway Coastal Route. This snakes some 130km from Belfast to Derry, passing fishing villages and holiday resorts with names that skip off the tongue like an Irish jig: Ballygally, Carnlough, Cushendall.
The Causeway route is considered one of the world’s great road trips — a European equivalent of California’s Big Sur. Yet the roads, lined with fuchsia and montbretia when we were there, were almost empty. It was pretty easy to find somewhere to camp, and we did so in Glenariff Forest Park. We were practically the only people there.
You can’t escape the rain in Ireland, so we learnt to embrace it; the rhythmical drumming on the roof, and the fat sea mists that rolled in. But the day we visited the Giant’s Causeway the sun was shining. This Unesco World Heritage site — some 40 000 basalt blocks sculpted by wind and frost 50-million years ago — is washed by foaming surf. The giant in question is Finn McCool, whose heroic feats form the celebrated Fenian Cycle of verse and prose. As daylight faded and the crowds thinned, I could quite believe how myth, legend and history had become jumbled in this enchanted spot.
The Giant’s Causeway was the only place where we saw tourists en masse. During our week in Ulster, we crisscrossed the province on deserted roads, navigating empty and majestic heather-clad mountain ranges such as the Sperrins, their valleys like plump green cushions.
We stopped off at Springhill, an atmospheric 17th-century “plantation” house, where a young Cambridge graduate regaled us with ghost stories between the usual, tweedy National Trust nuggets of history. We were the only visitors on her tour.
Meandering across the heartlands of Fermanagh and Tyrone, we passed prehistoric standing stones, ruined priories, woodland and marshy fields to arrive one evening at Navan Fort. This was the seat of the Celtic kings of Ulster, a place of magic and mystery and one of Ireland’s most important archaeological sites. Alone we ambled around the ancient mound, watching shadows lengthen over the distant hills of Armagh.
Armagh city, just a few miles on, is the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland and burial place of St Patrick, who gave his name to both the Catholic and Protestant cathedrals in this tiny hilltop city. Entirely by accident we found ourselves following the St Patrick’s Trail, which links places associated with the Irish patron saint, and we picked it up again at Downpatrick as we made the final leg of our journey east to the coast.
We reached the sea at Murlough Strand, a National Trust nature reserve of heathery heath and undulating dune skirting a 6.4km-long sandy beach. Here, the Mountains of Mourne sweep down into the Irish Sea, their purple summits buried in cloud that never delivers the rain it threatens.
For the length of our road trip the Belfast-born songwriter Van Morrison and his soulful melodies accompanied us. And by the time we reached Strangford Lough, a lush, subtropical sea loch fringed with villages and country estates, we really felt we were living the lyrics of his evocative song about his native landscape, Coney Island: “On and on over the hill and the craic (fun) is good …”