Belfast, Northern Ireland - Part 2

Wednesday

On Wednesday, I had booked myself in to a day trip with Allen's Tours that followed the Antrim Coast road up around the northern coastline of Northern Ireland. I got up early and had a solid cooked breakfast at the B&B before making the long walk into the city centre to hop on the Allen's Tours coach.

The day started fairly grey and drizzly, but gradually cleared throughout the morning and it was warm and sunny by the early afternoon. After leaving Belfast, the first stop was at the Carrickfergus Castle. We did not go inside the castle, as there was a lot of ground to cover during the day. Carrickfergus Castle was built by John de Courcy in 1177 after he conquered eastern Ulster. This is the spot where King William III (William of Orange) first set foot in Ireland in 1690, after General Schomberg attacked and took the castle the same year. There is a statue outside the castle of William of Orange. On the outskirts of the town of Carrickfergus, we passed the spot where the parents of America's 7th president, Andrew Jackson, lived just before they emigrated in 1765 to the United States, where Jackson was born in 1767.

Back on the bus, we headed further up County Antrim, through the small town of Glenarm and on to our second stop of the day, the small picturesque harbour town of Carnlough. There is an old hotel on the main street through Carnlough called the Londonderry Arms, which was once owned by Sir Winston Churchill, who occasionally stayed in the hotel and went fishing in the nearby harbour. We had about 15 minutes to stretch the legs in Carnlough and I went into a little corner dairy to buy a chocolate bar. The guy working in the dairy was your typical friendly Irishman who was fascinated that a Kiwi had found his way to a small town on the coast of Northern Ireland and he chatted away for a solid five minutes. He would still be chatting to me now if I hadn't insisted on leaving to catch the bus!

From there we drove through the green Glens of Antrim. The Glens of Antrim is a region comprising nine glens or valleys formed by melting glaciers centuries ago. The glens are an "area of outstanding natural beauty" and are a major tourist attraction in Northern Ireland. We drove through six of the nine glens on our way to the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge.

The Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge is a rope suspension bridge near the town of Ballintoy. It links the mainland with the tiny Carrick Island. It spans 2o metres and is 30 metres above the rocks below. It is thought salmon fishermen have been erecting rope bridges to the island for over 350 years. The bridge is now mainly a tourist attraction, and there were 227,000 visitors in 2007. The coastal scenery around the rope bridge is breath-taking. The photos below probably do not do justice to the beautiful green hills, the jagged rocky cliffs, the waves crashing on to the shore far below and the small islands just off the coast. It really is stunning. We could just see Rathlin Island out to sea, but it was a little hazy in the distance. Beyond Rathlin Island and further to the east is the Mull of Kintyre, which apparently you can see on a clear day, but we could not see it.

We had lunch from the tearooms at Carrick-A-Rede, which was actually very nice. I had a roast chicken sandwich and a piece of chocolate fudge. Then we were on the road again, this time just for a short distance before we stopped in at the nearby town of Ballintoy to check out its historic pub, the Fullerton Arms. I also wandered down to the edge of the town to check out the small white church sitting in the middle of some farmland. Apparently the church is the most photographed church in Ireland...I found that difficult to believe!

The next stop was the Old Bushmills Whiskey Distillery. The Old Bushmills Distillery was founded in 1608, making it the oldest licensed whiskey distillery in Ireland, although historical references to distilling at Bushmills can be traced back to around 1490. Again, we did not have time to do a tour of the distillery, but we stopped in at the gift shop and I bought a sample pack of their three most popular whiskeys as well as some whiskey-flavoured chocolate and fudge.

A little further up the road from Bushmills lie the ruins of Dunluce Castle, the most extensive ruins of a medieval castle in Northern Island. Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, first built the castle in the 1200s.

Then it was on to our final stop of the day and the highlight of the tour, the Giant's Causeway. The Giant's Causeway is a collection of around 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. The tops of the columns form stepping stones that lead from the foot of the cliff and disappear into the sea. Most of the columns are hexagonal but some have four, five, seven or eight sides. It is thought that the columns are around 62-65 million years old. The Giant's Causeway is a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site and is one of the greatest natural wonders in the United Kingdom.

The legend of the Giant's Causeway is that Irish giant Finn McCool built the causeway between Ireland and Scotland so that he could walk to Scotland to fight the Scottish giant Benandonner (there are similar basalt columns on a small island off the western coast of Scotland). When Finn McCool saw Benandonner coming towards him across the causeway, he was so frightened by the massive size of Benandonner that he fled back to Ireland and asked his wife to dress him as a baby and lie a blanket over him. When Benandonner arrived to fight Finn, he saw the sleeping "baby" and thought that if that was the size of the giant's baby, then Finn must be enormous, so he then fled back to Scotland, ripping up the causeway as he went in case Finn followed him!

We had about an hour to walk over the tops of the columns and marvel at the freak of nature. Some of the hexagonal columns fit so neatly together and look like perfect hexagons - it's difficult to believe they are not man-made. It was late in the day by the time we visited the causeway and the sun was starting to sink low in the sky, reflecting off the sea and making the surrounding rocks, cliffs and hills look stunning. The tour really was good value and I would recommend anyone to do it if you are visiting Northern Ireland. The driver / tour guide was excellent - he had plenty of interesting stories and Irish legends to tell along the way and it is a great way to see the countryside of Ireland.

Back in Belfast, I grabbed some dinner and had a pint of Guinness while I watched some football in a pub, but I was exhausted after the long day and headed to the B&B pretty early.

Thursday

On Thursday morning I enjoyed another cooked Irish breakfast before checking out of the B&B and making my way into the city centre. It was a warm, sunny morning in Belfast so I walked down by the waterfront, passing St George's market (which was not open), the Harmony of Belfast sculpture, the Waterfront Hall, the Salmon of Knowledge and back past the Prince Albert Memorial clock tower. Then I made my way over to the Cathedral Quarter and checked out St Anne's Cathedral and St Patrick's Church.

St Anne's Cathedral is a cathedral of the Church of Ireland. Construction began in 1899. The cathedral is beautifully decorated both inside and out - there is a massive Celtic Cross on the exterior of the north transept and a 100 metre stainless steel spire on top of the cathedral, that was installed in April 2007. St Patrick's Church is Roman Catholic and is much smaller, wedged in between surrounding buildings on Donegall Street. It looked as though it had been recently renovated inside - quite modern and very pretty.

After lunch at Robinson's Bistro Bar, I walked south of the city centre to the Queen's Quarter to check out the Queen's University buildings and wander through the Botanic Gardens, which were very peaceful. The area around the university was alive with students (much like north Dunedin) and there were a lot of cool bars, cafes and shops lining the streets between the city centre and the university. I rounded off the afternoon with a bit of shopping and a stop at the Linen Hall library.

The Linen Hall library was founded in 1788, making it the oldest library in Belfast and the last subscribing library in Ireland. It is renowned for its "unparalleled Irish and Local Studies Collection, ranging from comprehensive holdings of Early Belfast and Ulster printed books to the 250,000 items in the Northern Ireland Political Collection, the definitive archive of the recent troubles".

By now my legs were fairly sore from all the walking so I was ready to head for the airport and back home to London. I didn't manage to visit the Parliament Buildings at Stormont, which is a bit further away from the city centre - perhaps another time!

Tim

City Hall
Building

London-
derry Arms
Hotel in
Carnlough

One of the
Glens of
Antrim

Coastline
near Carrick-
A-Rede rope
bridge

The rope
bridge

Carrick-
A-Rede
coast

Ballintoy

church

Ruins of
Dunluce
Castle

Giant's
Causeway

And again

Tim at the

causeway

Harmony of
Belfast
sculpture

Salmon of
Knowledge

St Anne's
Cathedral

Inside
St Anne's

Queen's
University

Belfast, Northern Ireland - Part 1

Tuesday

I currently have a fair bit of free time on my hands whilst waiting for my new work visa to be approved, so when I discovered that Ryanair had a massive sale, which included flights from London to Belfast for £5 each way, it made sense to spend a few days in the land of the leprechauns. On Tuesday morning I got up at a ridiculous hour and made my way to London Stansted, which seems closer to Scotland than London, for an 8.30am flight to Belfast.

As it happened Colin and Rachael were in Belfast from the Sunday night until the Wednesday, so our travels overlapped by a day and we got to explore the city together on Tuesday. After arriving in an overcast and chilly Belfast and finding my way to my B&B, I set off for the city centre and met Colin and Rachael.

We decided to spend the morning taking a 90-minute political history tour around Belfast in a black taxi. Our driver / tour guide, Pat, was very informative and the tour was excellent. Pat took us just out of the city centre to the suburban area around Shankill Road and stopped to explain the origins of the conflicts in Northern Ireland.

Queen Elizabeth I, knowing that Ireland would side with Catholic Spain, was concerned that England could be invaded more easily by the Spanish if they came in through Ireland. In 1573 she sent the Earl of Essex to Belfast and he easily beat the Catholic chieftains, but failed to build a lasting town. Then in the early 17th century, Belfast was settled by English and Scottish settlers, under a plan by Sir Arthur Chichester. The Act of Union in 1800 dissolved Ireland's parliament and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. When Catholics began buying land in Ulster, Protestants formed vigilante groups to burn out the Catholics in dawn raids. Catholics and Protestants battled for centuries for their slice of an inadequate economic cake.

The Anglo-Welsh War of 1919-21 led to a treaty setting up an Irish Free State. However, Protestant resistance in the north-east promised such bloodshed that the politicians compromised with the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Under this Act, Ireland was partitioned into Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland (the six most-Protestant counties of the province of Ulster) and the Catholic-dominated rest of the country. As the largest city in Ulster, Belfast became the capital of Northern Ireland, and a grand parliament building was constructed at Stormont in 1932. The Governement of Northern Ireland was dominated by upper and middle class unionists (i.e., those who wished to remain part of the United Kingdom), and the needs and wishes of working class Protestants and Catholics of all classes were virtually ignored.

Trouble returned in the 1960s when students marched to demand a fair allocation of public housing and jobs for Catholics. As old animosities flared up, Protestants began setting fire to Catholics' houses in Belfast. The IRA resurrected itself to protect them and Protestant terrorist groups were formed in retaliation.

It took 30 years, the abolition of the local parliament, the imposition of direct rule from Westminster, the creation of a Dublin-London political axis, major population shifts and the loss of more than 3,200 lives before the province voted in 1998 for peace through a power-sharing Assembly. The last 10 years have seen a relatively peaceful period in Belfast's history, however, we were all shocked when Pat told us that there are still massive walls separating Catholic housing from Protestant housing in some suburban areas and gates between these areas that are locked every night to diminish the likelihood of violence on the streets.

We drove to a housing estate in the Protestant area and wandered around looking at the dozens of wall murals that appear on the ends of the rows of houses. Many of them are memorials to people who died in the conflicts, but some still have threatening political undertones. The housing estate and the rest of the Protestant area was covered with hundreds of Union Jack flags of the United Kingdom (far more than you would see in London!), whilst the Catholic areas displayed dozens of Republic of Ireland flags. We struggled to understand how these people can hope to move on, when they still have these wall murals and flags showing their allegiance decorating their neighbourhoods.

We continued the tour away from the Protestant area around Shankill Road over towards the Catholic area. We stopped to sign the "peace wall", the enormous wall separating the two areas. We couldn't believe that a wall was still required, especially not one of that size. There were plenty of messages on the wall from New Zealanders, good to see! The tour continued right into the Catholic area and we stopped at a small memorial garden, to remember those who were killed in the conflicts. We then stopped on Falls Road, another infamous road that witnessed many violent deaths. A mural on Falls Road remembers Bobby Sands and nine other Republican prisoners who died as a result of hunger strikes in 1981. The event provoked major rioting across the city.

After the tour concluded, we grabbed some lunch at BK, and then we walked through the city, taking in some of the sights and attractions of Belfast, such as the beautiful City Hall building, the Prince Albert Memorial clock tower and the Salmon of Knowledge, a 10-metre ceramic skinned salmon commissioned to celebrate the return of salmon to the previously polluted River Lagan. The sculpture's skin is decorated with a mosaic of texts and messages relating to Belfast's history.

A spot of shopping was followed by a well deserved pint of Ireland's finest. If truth be told there were several pints of Guinness consumed by the end of the night. We made our way to Belfast's most famous pub, the Crown Liquor Saloon, where we enjoyed a couple of drinks inside our own closed booth and marvelled at the superb tiling, glasswork and ornamental woodwork dating from the 1880s. Next we made our way two doors along the street to Robinson's Bar, which was fire-bombed in 1991, gutting the interior, but has been rebuilt to its original 1846 design. It is now home to five bars, including the very Irish themed "Fibber Magees". We spent the rest of the evening in Fibber Magees and Robinson's and we managed to catch most of Liverpool's Champions League win on TV, much to the delight of Colin and Rachael. We also had dinner at the bistro bar upstairs above Robinson's, which was really good.

The bars were packed full and some of the patrons were very drunk...on a Tuesday night...only in Ireland! One guy came stumbling up to Colin and I when we were at the bar and slammed his full pint down on the bar in front of us, at which point we were a little concerned, as he was a very large Irishman. But then he held out his hand for us to shake and we imagine he would have said "hello" and introduced himself, but he was so drunk he couldn't actually form any words. Another guy came bursting out of the toilets muttering away to himself about mash potato... At that point we figured we should probably call it a day before we ended up like these guys, so we headed home.

Tim








City
Hall













Prince Albert
Memorial
clock tower














Wall
mural
Protestant
area










Mural
depicting
legend of
Red Hand
of Ulster








Massive
wall
separating
Catholics and
Protest-
ants









Memorial
Garden











Mural
remem-
bering
Bobby Sands'
hunger strike










Colin and
Mr Speaker

















Salmon of
Knowledge












Crown
Liquor
Saloon












Inside
the
Crown










Colin and
Rachael in
the booth











Fibber
Magee

Day Trip to Blackburn

On Saturday morning we rose early and made the short walk to Emirates Stadium, where we boarded one of the Arsenal supporters' buses bound for Blackburn. We had managed to get tickets to our first proper away match, the premier league clash between Blackburn v Arsenal. Blackburn is a small town in Lancashire, north-west England. The bus journey took around four and a half hours each way, but luckily we had the Saturday newspapers and lots of snacks to keep us going!

We arrived in Blackburn around 1.30pm and went straight to Ewood Park. We grabbed some lunch at the ground and had a pint before taking our seats and watching the Arsenal players warm up. We were in row 3, so we were very close to the field, right beside one of the corner flags!

There were a lot of Arsenal fans there and we easily made more noise than the home fans - although that wasn't hard, they barely said a word. After about half an hour of Arsenal chants and nothing in response from the home fans, the Gooners started chanting, "Shall we sing a song for you?" - quality.

Arsenal opened the scoring in the 8th minute, with England's latest superstar Theo Walcott beating a few defenders and passing to Robin van Persie who scored. Then Emmanuel Adebayor scored a hat-trick of goals to complete a 4-0 demolition. Arsenal dominated the match and could have (should have) scored more. A very pleasing result in what has traditionally been a tough place to get an away win.

After the game, the Arsenal players showed their appreciation to the travelling fans and Theo Walcott came right down to the fence where we were standing and gave his match shirt to a little kid just a metre away from us. Then it was back on the bus and back to London town. Surprisingly the weather in the north-west was really good. It was warm and sunny the whole day...it must be just London that is constantly grey and gloomy, not the entire country!

On Sunday, it actually was sunny in London for a change, so we went for a big walk down to Angel and along the canals to Shoreditch and then back home. It is really pretty down by the canals and there were plenty of people out walking, jogging and cycling. On the way home we stopped off at the Compton Arms for a Sunday roast - top quality.

Ewood
Park

Fabregas
and
Adebayor

Arsenal
goalkeeper
Manuel
Almunia

Arsenal
carving up

And cele-
brating
another
goal

The
Gooners

Outside
Ewood
Park

Proud as
punch

Walking by
the canal

Boop

Boop

Arsenal

Fans,

On Saturday, Tim's friend Simon kindly invited Tim along to a corporate box at Emirates Stadium to watch the Arsenal v Newcastle premier league game. Simon had been invited by a broker through his work. We got there nice and early and enjoyed a few beers and the fantastic food on offer before the game started. Arsenal had recovered from a shaky start to the season and dominated right from the start to win 3-0.

There were a few celebrities on the corporate box layer. Matt Lucas, an English comedian and actor was in the box right next to ours (with his dog). It was more exciting, however, spotting Arsenal legend Patrick Vieira, who was sitting with new Arsenal signing Mikael Silvestre. After the game Tim and Simon met Vieira and Silvestre, shook hands and grabbed a photo. Vieira is a massive guy. He was a touch taller than Tim and not as wiry as he used to look on the field - he is actually pretty solid.

After the crowd had dispersed, Tim, Simon and the broker were pretty much the last people in the stadium (the broker insisted that we stayed and finished off the New Zealand wine that had been provided in the box) and just as we were about to leave, current Arsenal star Theo Walcott wandered right past us. Again we stopped him, shook his hand, got his autograph on the match programme and got a photo with him (although it didn't come out very well). He is a pretty small guy - lucky he is so fast!

After leaving the stadium, Tim, Simon and Megan had a few drinks at our place (very close to the Emirates) and Anthea met us before we all went out for dinner on Upper Street. By this stage, Tim and Simon had had a bit to drink so the memory is not too good, but it may have been a French restaurant...?

On Tuesday it was Megan's birthday, so Tim and Megan met up after work for a dinner and show combo. We had dinner at Katana, a Thai / Pan Asian restaurant, which was really nice. Then we made our way to the Noel Coward Theatre to see Avenue Q - the musical. Avenue Q is a comedic musical about a college graduate who moves into a new neighbourhood in New York. It was very funny, we both loved it.







New Gunner
Mikael
Silvestre










Monsieur
Vieira -
legend













Theo (our
photo didn't
come out)