Belfast & Northern Ireland
Wednesday, 3 December 2025I was briefly in Northern Ireland in June 2025 for a family wedding – Maureen’s family – there was one in 2024 as well. My plan to walk the spectacular Gobbins Cliff Path, north of Belfast, while I was there fell through because the walk was closed due to a ‘recent rockfall’. Perhaps it’s been reopened and then closed again due to another rockfall because in December 2025 they’re still claiming it’s closed due to a ‘recent rockfall’. In fact since 2015 the path was been closed as long as it has been open and tour operators are reluctant to feature the walk, due to its frequent closures.
▲ Maureen and I did drive around the 25km long Strangford Lough, starting with a lunch stop at Donaghedee although, despite the greedy-looking octopus, we didn’t dine in the Captain’s Table.
▲ Instead we dived into the Stormy Cup to sample their ‘Award Winning Ulster Fry’ for Maureen and a Belfast bap for me. Either was enough to make up for missing breakfast although both took a hell-of-a-long time to arrive. Never mind they were worth waiting for and the very popular café is decorated with a wonderful collection of Irish and Northern Irish travel posters including railway travel posters in the loo and a warning not to use the toilet while stopped in a station.
▲ At the southern end of the lough it narrows down to the crossing between Portaferry and Strangford. We had to wait a spell for space to squeeze our car on board the very popular ferry for the quick crossing.
▲ Built in 1839 ‘Maedb’ is the oldest mainline steam locomotive in Ireland and is part of the impressive collection at the Ulster Transport Museum at Holywood, between Belfast and Bangor.
▲ Of course there are Titanic exhibits including this fine model of the doomed Belfast-built ocean liner heading to the bottom in 1912. Visit the superb Titanic Belfast museum, at the actual site where the mighty vessel was built and launched, for the complete Titanic story: as they say in Belfast ‘it was alright when it left here.’
In fact the Titanic, launched in 1911, had two sister ships, the Olympic launched in 1910 and the Britannic in 1914. The unfortunate Britannic was used as a hospital ship in WW I until it hit a German mine and sank in 1916, just off the coast of the Greek Island of Kea. I visited Kea in 2025, but sadly there’s no way I could have added the Britannic to my wreck dive checklist. At 120 metres depth the Britannic is much more accessible than the 3800-metre-deep Titanic – and in much more welcoming waters – but that’s still a depth strictly for very serious, well equipped and well trained scuba divers. I’ve never been below 50 metres. The Britannic does feature in the Ulster Transport Museum.
The Olympic, the third Titanic sister ship, sailed on until 1935, when it was retired and went to the scrap heap. That only made it 25 years old, I regularly find myself on aircraft with more years in their log books. The Olympic certainly had a history of colliding with other ships during its career, the Titanic only collided with an iceberg. In 1918 during WW I the Olympic had a deliberate, and successful, collision when it ran down and sank U-103, a German U-boat submarine.
▲ The Transport Museum also featured this collection of racing motorcycles, all piloted by Northern Irish motorcycling heroes from the 1970s to the 2010s: Joey Dunlop, Robert Dunlop, Ryan Farquhar, Philip McCallen, Frank Kennedy, Tom Herron and Owen McNally. Most of them killed on the track, racing on Northern Ireland’s spectacular, but horribly dangerous, road circuits is not a sensible occupation although some of them went further afield to meet their ends. The even more horribly dangerous Isle of Man Mountain Circuit is only 100km east of Belfast. Joey Dunlop, voted Northern Ireland’s greatest sports star, won 26 races on the Isle of Man and 24 Ulster Grands Prix before he was killed in a race in Estonia.
