Well we woke up on Day FOUR in our little stone milking house, said our goodbyes to Clare and Ivan, and headed out to see the North Coast.
The North Coast of Ireland is absolutely stunning. The rolling hills, the quilted landscape, the beautiful cliffs and deep blue ocean make the north end of County Antrim one of the most beautiful places I've been to.On the way to the very top, you pass by Slemish, which is the hill that St. Patrick was enslaved on as a boy and tended sheep, which I think is kind of a cool little "oh by the way" sight as you pass by.
As you get to the coast and are enjoying the scenery, it's always a fun little thing to stop off at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. 
Carrick-a-rede is a very cool, but also nerve wracking suspension rope bridge that exists for, well, no real purpose I don't think. There is an old fishing house on the cliff side down below (I can't imagine what their homeowners insurance is on that thing), but other than that, the bridge is there just for amusement.It's about a 1 mile hike to the bridge, and when the weather is nice (which it was absolutely PERFECT for us about 95% of our 10 days there) it is a really nice little walk.
Once on the island, we relaxed a bit, checked out the jellyfish way down below, and peered Sheep Island, named so because it was home to a few dozen sheep for quite some time...they would just eat, sleep, and reproduce with no way off the island. Very bizarre and yet, so randomly Irish.Continuing on the highway we came upon a place I had passed by before but had never visited: Bushmills Distillery.
Bushmills is the name of the town, and the Distillery is where they make Bushmills Irish Whiskey, the oldest whiskey in the world. It actually holds the very first grant to distill, which goes back to 1608, so yes, they just celebrated their 400th Anniversary (though no doubt whiskey was being created on this land for many, many years before the grant to distill). it's a pretty phenomenal little piece of history. We got to check out parts of the distillery, and they even had a free little whiskey tasting in their store, which was pretty cool, because they brought out their good stuff. :o)
Whiskey, funny enough comes from the Irish words uisce beatha, which literally means "water of life." Irish monks found that whiskey was safe to drink during times of plague and disease, simply because it was a distilled beverage. But you know there was that one monk who was subsequently ordered to a vow of silence by the other monks when he made mention that you could just simply distill water and there would be no after effects. Poor guy.
From Bushmills we drove a little over a mile to Dunluce Castle. Dunluce is one of the cooler castles for a few reasons. Firstly, it's in quite good form for its age (and location, on the tumultuous north coast) and it's quite an impressive structure. Because of its location, on the coast it has a great surrounding: a beautiful view of the northern Atlantic Ocean.
However, another one of its unique features is the large cave underneath the structure. You can hike down below the castle, sort of like you see where I took the picture of Katie, and if you walk toward the castle, you can climb down into a huge cave. Inside the cave, which is pictured here, there is a good sized inlet you can row a boat into. Cargo and supplies (and sometimes would-be invaders) would go from larger boats into the row boats through the cave. I have to say that being in there makes you feel like a you're in some kind of pirate movie of sorts. Cool stuff.Additionally, the story itself of how it became abandoned is quite interesting as well. Built in the 12th Century, it was inhabited for a few hundred years until sometime in the 17th Century when a storm caused part of the cliff it rests on to collapse, bringing the entire kitchen into the sea. Unrepairable of course, and now potentially dangerous to the rest of the structure, the castle had to be abandoned, and it lay in ruins ever since.
I had a strange run in once at Dunluce back in 2004. I was walking around, just snapping photos, and I heard someone say, "Jobey?" Amazingly, it was a girl named Hannah who I went to Bible College with in Murrieta. Here we are thousands of miles from home in a random country in Europe in a random castle on the north coast on a random day in the year. So crazy!Even stranger is that a few weeks later back home, I was actually at the Bible College visiting and someone comes up to me and says "weren't you just in Northern Ireland?" "Yes," I said, "how did you know?" He replied, "I was at Dunluce Castle and I remember seeing two Americans running into each other that knew each other."
Weird thing is that he wasn't with her group (both Hannah and I had long since been out of Bible College) but he just happened to be visiting Dunluce at the same time and just happened to also be going to the same College we went to, though he didn't know that at the time because he didn't eavesdrop on the whole situation. Very weird.
Anyway, he recognized me randomly as I walked on campus simply because I had long dreadlocks at the time, and he probably just took extra notice of me at Dunluce since there aren't a lot of dreads in Ireland.
Very bizarre, I must say.
From Dunluce Castle we made our way to the Beech Hill Hotel in County Derry, which was a 17th Century luxury hotel on beautiful grounds, complete with a water wheel and a sweeping, almost southern US "swampy" kind of a landscape. The interior was elegant, and the whole place had sort of a Disneyland Haunted Mansion vibe (in a good way). Bill Clinton had even stayed here before while he was president. We dropped our stuff off and headed out into Derry city.Derry is interesting, to say the least. My first desire to see Derry is because the Irish on my mom's mom's side are from County Derry. Secondly, Derry has quite a bit of both rich ancient and modern Irish history to be seen, most interesting to me being the modern history.
The thing is, Northern Ireland has been torn in two for quite some time. In 1912, as I wrote about in Day ONE, the country gained its independence from England, however a portion of it, 6 counties in the north to be exact, wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom and so it is now known as Northern Ireland. This is why in the North you see Northern Ireland flags and British Union Jack flags, but no gold, white and green Republic of Ireland tri-colour flags. Kind of think "American Civil War" type thing (See a movie called "the Wind that Shakes the Barley" if this part of history intrigues you).
So the North has been home to the most conflict in all of Ireland: Irish Catholics against British Protestants. It's very sad, and both sides are at extreme fault for going too far on too many occasions. Derry has been caught in that crossfire on many occasions, the most notable happening in 1972 on an event that has since been called Bloody Sunday (of which the song "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2 is written about and is incredibly powerful when they play the song in Ireland).
Bloody Sunday was a day when Irish Catholics in Derry decided to peacefully march in the town for their Civil Rights. Catholics at the time were treated nearly identical to blacks in our south in the 60's. Segregation, unequal job opportunities, racism, you name it. Signs on windows would say "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply" (they were called "NINAs"). This particular group of Catholics in Derry admired the ways of Martin Luther King, Jr. and followed his peaceful practices, rather than the practices of the notorious IRA. This was their Civil Rights Movement. Think of 70's Ireland as being identical to 60's America for blacks.
On this day, during this march (during which ironically the 1971 film "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was being shown at the local cinema, though the events were unrelated, of course), for no apparent reason, British police opened fire on the crowd, killing 14, some at point blank range...women, men, and children. None of the police were indicted or disciplined. Bloody Sunday occurred in what is called the Bogside, the poor Catholic section of town just on the outside of the old city walls (which you can see in the picture and happen to be 400 years old and is one of the finest examples of a European walled city). Watch the 2002 movie "Bloody Sunday" directed by Paul Greengrass for a very intense and realistic view of this event.
Since then Derry has been a hotbed for friction, which can be plainly viewed by their descriptive building sized murals, such as the one in the picture of the Catholic girl called "Death of Innocence" and the many Irish national tri-colour flags (no British Union Jacks anywhere) and gold, white, and green painted lamp posts and curbs. You see, since Derry isn't a part of the Republic of Ireland, displaying Irish flags and colors is a bit of a, well to speak in the kindest way possible, spit in the face to the British.So we walked along the ancient city walls, and before leaving took a drive through the rough and tumble Bogside to get a close up view of the heated animosity and ancient British/Irish tension. Quite an incredible, overwhelming, and sad experience.
After the drive through town, we headed back to the Beech Hill Hotel and called it a night.
Next Post: Day FIVE...Driving the west coast of Ireland and on to Galway...
