My father died while planning his last trip home. An Irish emigrant who had gone to the New World, he suffered the usual homesickness, a homesickness that for him became more compelling with each passing year. Visits to the north of Ireland had the quality of pilgrimages. He lived for these expeditions into his own past.
It was not just relatives and old friends. It was the physical stuff of Ireland, the hedgerows and the glens, the view of the Mournes from Rathfriland and the headlands of north Antrim, the sea at Donaghadee and the River Cusher disappearing beneath the bridge where he had learnt to swim. When death interrupted his last travel plans, I bore his ashes home. I wanted to make a pilgrimage in his honour, to make a journey round my father.
He grew up in north Armagh, in Tandragee, whose name, from the Irish, means “back to the wind.” From the top of the town, where he played as a child, one looks south towards the Mountains of Mourne, shouldering the horizons. The Mournes are the mesmerising backdrop to every view in these counties, and were, in those far-off days, the limits to my father’s world.
The road south to the Mournes runs through the gentle hills of Co Down, an intricate landscape laced with hedgerows and overgrown lanes. Along one of them, a lifetime ago, my father encountered my mother and took her on a hot date to the Grand Opera House in Belfast. One thing led to another. They were married for almost 50 years.
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I STAYED the night in Dromore with Jimmy and Elise, at Sylvan Hill House, where hospitality was borne on plates of wheaten bread. Elise had travelled the world, from Mongolia to the sources of the Nile, but seen nowhere more beautiful than the Mountains of Mourne visible from her drawing-room windows.
The mountains arrived abruptly the next day beyond Hilltown. It was as if I had stepped in a single stride across some geographical border — the hedgerows fell away, the pastures were replaced by moorland, the sedentary cattle by itinerant sheep. But for the sheep, the Mournes are empty. Nobody had discovered the secret of habitation here. This is the mystery of the Mournes, that they should feel so remote barely 30 miles from Belfast.
I climbed to the saddle between Slieve Meelbeg and Slieve Meelmore. The ground was dark and peaty, and bounced gently beneath my feet. The granite outcrops might have been smoothed by the wind. Between the tussocks of grass grew purple heather and tufted bog cotton, which were used in the old days for pillows and mattresses.
Beyond the ridge, a silent lake appeared, with a single tent on its shore. Two girls emerged from the tent. They rushed towards me, slightly delirious with their adventure, as if they were in the middle of the Gobi. I imagined hunger or thirst had the better of them.
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“Have ye any cigarettes about ye?” they cried.
It was their luck, in the wilds of the Mournes, to find a nonsmoker.
I climbed on, to the summit of Slieve Doan. From the top, there were views south to Carlingford Lough and the sea, with the east coast of Ireland curving out of sight. North, between the bare heads of Meelmore and Bernagh, were the patchwork fields of the Lagan Valley. By turning your head, you seemed to take in the whole sweep of Irish history, from the Vikings to the plantation.
St Patrick landed barely 20 miles away as the crow flies.
Heads appeared unexpectedly from behind a rock. It was a family from the south, from Cork, who seemed to be roasting half an ox. They wouldn’t think of me departing without a wee drop of tea and a bit of a chat.
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“Antrim,” they chorused. “You mustn’t miss Antrim. The bonniest bit of Ireland.”
“I was born in Antrim,” I said.
I DROVE down through the scented gloom of Rostrevor pine forest to the sea and Warrenpoint, which was as far as my father’s childhood holidays took him. Along the coast, I stopped for afternoon tea — two strapping scones — in the library of the Slieve Donard Hotel, a grand red edifice on the seafront in Newcastle.
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Further east, on the shores of Strangford Lough, is Castle Ward. It was built in the 1760s by Lord Bangor and his wife, Lady Anne. Theirs was a disputatious relationship. They couldn’t agree about anything. When it came to the house, they couldn’t agree on the style. The result is “one of the strangest architectural compromises ever perpetrated.” One half of the house, both internally and externally, is in the traditional classical style favoured by Lord Bangor. The other follows the contemporary fashion for the gothic that so enthralled his wife. The house was more successful than the relationship. Lady Anne soon decamped to Bath, where she spent the rest of her life looking for other people with whom to disagree.
Of the two styles, the gothic has worn less well. John Betjeman, a visitor in the years between the wars, was un- impressed by it. “Spent some time in Lady Ward’s boudoir,” he wrote of a room with a fabulous swagged ceiling. “Like sitting under a cow’s udder.” The house is great fun, but the real treasure here is the vast gardens, laid out with the classical formality of the early 18th century and much softened by later Romanticism.
A small ferry takes cars and passengers across the Narrows, at the mouth of Strangford Lough. The Ards peninsula, a long finger of land between the lough and the sea, is gentle farming country. At Kircubbin Bay, people were out at low tide with their rakes, collecting cockles and winkles. Below Greyabbey, I watched the oystercatchers breaking cockle shells on the rocks. The late sun glided through the old abbey.
I remember my father here, standing in the ruined nave, discussing Irish monasticism. My father was a vicar, never happier than when wandering through an ancient abbey.
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He took charge of his first church in Co Antrim, in Ahoghill, where I was born. Hard by are the Glens of Antrim, the Antrim Coast Road and what is now known as the Causeway Coast of north Antrim. It is a landscape unequalled in Ireland.
Its most famous attraction is the Giant’s Causeway, of which Samuel Johnson famously remarked: “Worth seeing, but not worth coming to see.” He was right, of course. The Causeway is interesting, if you are 12. There are funny stones and a legend. But its chief appeal is that it confines visitors neatly to one site, leaving the rest of the north Antrim coast unspoilt.
I bypassed the maelstrom of coaches and tourists, of sou- venir tea towels and audiovisual presentations, and took instead to the cliff paths to the east between the Causeway and the ruins of Dunseverick Castle. I was walking in the footsteps of Francisco de Cuellar, who staggered along this stretch of coast on January 24, 1589.
Poor Francisco was a survivor of one of the Spanish Armada wrecks. Having made it ashore in Sligo, he was hoping to walk to Spain. Nobody told him he was heading in the wrong direction because nobody knew the right direction.
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As Francisco walked, he heard reports of further wrecks. Twenty Armada ships were to founder on the Irish rocks. The last of them, the flagship,Girona, went down here at Lacada Point. She was carrying 1,300 people. Five survived.
It looked an innocent spot in the morning sun, the sea flat, the headland garlanded with heather. Francisco was in deep grief. “I went to the houses of some of the savages that were there” — I think he meant us — “who told of the great misfortune of our people who were drowned at that place and showed me many jewels and valuables of theirs, which distressed me greatly.”
It is a pity he was so out of sorts, for it is a wonderful walk. Blue harebells and spring squill grew along the cliff path. Waves rumbled in the shingle bays below. The wind carried the scent of wild thyme and of peat. From one side came the cry of curlews, from the other the bleat of sheep. On such a wild coast, it was touching to have the neat, parcelled fields so close by.
FURTHER south, the glens of Antrim — there are nine in all — sweep down from the Antrim plateau in a crescendo of greens. Hedges, choked with ferns, divide the fields into the characteristic ladder farms, so each farmer has his fair share of poor higher fields and rich lower fields. Each of the glens leads straight to the sea and to Scotland. On a clear day, from harbour villages like Cushendun and Cushendall and Glenarm, you can see houses on the Mull of Kintyre.
From Ballycastle, there are two roads to the glens. The first leads inland across the high bogland, a pure, uncluttered landscape. Above Cushendun, the plateau suddenly falters, the green glen opens at your feet and the sea stretches before you, framed by the headlands of Knockore.
The other road, my father’s favourite, cleaves to the coast round Torr Head. It is one of the most beautiful roads in Ireland. The hedgerows dripped with wild fuchsia. Tipsy fields plunged towards the sea. It was a day of weather. Squalls of sun raced across the waves from Scotland, invading each bay in turn and climbing the steep fields at their backs. Every hour or so, a brief shower arrived to freshen the colours.
When CS Lewis, another Ulsterman abroad, was asked about his idea of paradise, he replied that he imagined it as the dreaming spires of Oxford set among the gentle hills of Co Down, the best of all worlds.
We stand on the edge of a great mystery, said the vicar at my father’s funeral oration. It is impossible to know what lies beyond this world. But if the spirit of my father lingers somewhere about Torr Head, I know he will be happy, and in his own paradise.
Travel brief
Getting there: BMI (0870 607 0555, www.flybmi.com) flies to Belfast City from Heathrow; from £50 return. Flybe (0871 700 0123, www.flybe.com) flies to Belfast City from a number of UK regional airports, including Southampton, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle and Exeter; from £34.
Getting around: all the usual car-hire companies have desks at the airports. Avis (0870 010 0287, www.avis.co.uk) has a week’s rental from £150.
Where to stay: Sylvan Hill House, near Dromore (028 9269 2321), is a delightful and comfortable Georgian residence with doubles from £60, B&B. After a day in the Mournes, Tyrella House (028 4485 1422) offers the sanctuary of a grand Georgian mansion, an old estate and a private beach; doubles start at £90, B&B. Bushmills Inn (028 2073 2339, www.bushmills-inn.com; doubles from £158, B&B) is a great base for north Antrim, with the added benefit of tours of Ireland’s oldest whiskey distillery in the same village. In Cushendun, Cloneymore B&B (028 2176 1443) is a good option, with doubles at £44.
Further information: call the Belfast and Northern Ireland Welcome Centre (028 9024 6609, www.gotobelfast.com) or visit the Northern Ireland Tourist Board’s website (www.discovernorthernireland.com).