Ireland Day 3

Sunday, 21 July 2024

Today was huge.  Our first stop was almost 3 hours north to Prehan Forest on the outskirts of Londonderry where the last little scrap of original Irish forest apparently remained.

We walked a very small loop of it then continued into Londonderry to visit the Tower Museum which had an amusing exhibition from the Derry Girls series, then a very unamusing, long and detailed history of all the atrocities and tragedies that had befallen the city since ancient times.  Good grief. The constant power shifts between Protestants and Catholics in this city was a story of much pain and destruction. 

No time to dwell too much though – as it was onwards to Dunluce Castle which also gave us the opportunity to admire the spectacular coastline in that area.

Further down the road was the famous Giants Causeway which was the reason we had had to keep to a pretty strict schedule all morning. It’s so popular you have to book a 30 minute arrival slot to make sure you can get it. Ours was 3.30 to 4pm. Luckily we arrived early as it was a fair trek down to the rocks themselves from the visitor centre so we quickly burned up our allotted 1 hour visiting time.  The rocks were ok – impressive but not absolutely amazing. I should mention that to visit them cost well over $100 dollars – to park and walk down the path to them and back. Imagine if Australia started charging for people to park and see the features on the Great Ocean Road – it seems pretty normal here though.

After that we did more coastal driving to a spot with a famous swing bridge that fishermen used in the olden times. This is what it would have looked like if we had paid the $30 each to go over it..

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instead we stood at a great distance to check it out – which did afford us views a seal playing in the water far below which was cool.  After that we allowed ourselves 7 minutes to eat lunch (at 5pm) in the car.

Then we turned inland to check out something called ‘dark hedges’.  It was a bit lame really – just a lane where the trees grew over it a bit to make a canopy – Kangaroo Island does this a lot better and without charging 5 pounds for parking.

Back to the the coast we made our way down towards Belfast, stopping to check out some caves and at all the nice views along the way.

We finally made it to our tiny apartment in Belfast at 8pm – not too bad given the day we’d had.