every year on my annual visit home to see the mammy, i break up the fortnight by spending about half a week at the mammy’s house , then go off into the wilds camping for a week and finally back to the mammy’s for the last few days before i head home again. the next few entries will tell the thrilling story of the ‘camping expedition’ part of my holiday for this year.
me and mazza got up reasonably early and did a bit of pruning on our luggage as we didnae want to take every bit of clothing we had with us into the wilderness. in the end, by dint both of oversight but primarily of being a fuckwitt, i actually ended up taking not enough duds with me - but this should become apparent as the story unfolds!
after loading up the car with our winter woolies and the stash of food and booze we’d got on our shopping expedition to northcott the previous day, we waved our cheery goodbyes and drove off towards belfast at about 11am. we took that long downhill left off the antrim road whose name escapes me [glen road?], but which brings you out near rathcoole and then got down onto the shore road near whiteabbey - remembering to give granny a wave as we passed carnmoney cemetery! the weather looked quite promising at this stage. the sky was trying it’s hardest to stay blue, although the odd wee cloud was scudding about and spitting on us for want of something better to do. once on the shore road, it’s a pretty straight run through carrick and onto larne, before the journey starts to get officially scenic. in fact the only thing that really grabbed our attention on this stretch of the journey was a spot of rubber-necking at a road accident. there didnae seem to be any serious injuries, but i could tell from the positions of the crumpled cars that the one containing the dumb woman driver had been at fault!
once through larne, we turned onto the antrim coast road and as the housing estates gave way to steep hills sloping down to the turquoise sea and all those wee seaside villages - especially ballygally, were we spent many a happy hour as brats when treated to a day at the seaside - i started to feel like we were really off our expedition at last.
bridge over the river in er… glenarm … i think!
apart from a quick leap from the car to capture the above majestic vista, we pretty much just stayed in the motor admiring the view until we got to ballycastle. we’d been thinking about trying to get onto one of the many islands round ireland, as a bit of a mission within a mission. mazza, especially, was quite keen on this idea. so i wanted to see what the score was as regards getting over to rathlin [the boats for rathlin leave from ballycastle]. although a notice in the ferry booking office window claimed that the season ran until the end of september, there seemed to be no signs of life. we had a desultory walk round the harbour, looking for any action near the rathlin island slipway but alas there was no-one to be seen and the gates were locked and chained. so we emptied our bladders in some public bogs and then headed back to the car. on the way i grabbed a few shots of some nice wee boats tied up in the harbour, so as to justify having heaved my spotty arse out the motor in the first place.
ballycastle harbour - lots of boats but no ‘jolly jack tars’
on up the coast road again admiring more of the same scenery, until somewhere near bushmills [i think? - oh dear. i'm not very precise with my geography, am i?] we came across a sign for kinbane castle - a likely sounding attraction, which we’d headed towards last year, only to find, after following this windy road for a couple of miles that access to the cliff path that led to the castle was blocked by a wire mesh fence.
“well”, we reasoned, “whatever work they were doing that required closing the cliff path a year ago, it’s bound to be finished by now!” so off we set “whee-ing” and “whooping” down that self-same old windy road again. after about a mile we got to the bottom where it ended in a small parking/turning area of tarmac. and guess what? - yep! the fence was still there and access to the cliff path still blocked. we were a bit pissed off at this, to say the least. i mean if the fucker’s been closed for over a year, at least you could take the roadsign down that points the unwary traveller in its direction! we dismounted from our horseless carriage and went up to the fence to investigate and found a note pinned to it advising that the path to the castle was closed for ’safety reasons’. the path itself led away behind the fence and then disappeared round a bend in the cliffs after aboout 10 or 20 feet, but what i could see of it looked fine to me. so i got down on my back and slithered under the fence [thanx to a couple of feet of gap at the bottom] and went to look round the hidden corner, expecting to see the path crumbling into the boiling sea below.
instead, i saw that it was solid as a rock, smoothly cemented and edged by a sturdy iron fence. so i called to mazza and she joined me on the ‘wrong side of the fence’. we’d not gone too far down the path when we noticed that there was quite a lot of steel mesh pinned to the cliff wall above the path and quite a few pebbles and rocks of varying sizes lying on the surface. at last the reason for the health and safety overload was clear - the path was prone to being hit by rocks falling from the cliff above! we reckoned the chances of a rock choosing just the minute we happened to be walking underneath to fling itself from the cliff face were pretty slim, so we decided to continue heroically. although we did keep a wary eye on the rock face towering above us for the slightest sign of anything that looked like it was about to ‘dislodge’. it took us about 10 - 15 minutes to wind our way down the cliff path. i was nursing a damaged tendon in my knee which was just starting to heal up, so i was a bit wary of what a sudden jolt might do do it and took care to descend as smoothly as possible.
when we eventually got to the bottom of the cliff, there was a short flat area of grass and rocks which led towards the sea. at the end of this ’causeway’ [for want of a better word] stood a huge rock, on top of which stood the ruins of kinbane castle itself. stone steps cut into the side of the rock lead upwards to the ruins, but these too were blocked off with scaffolding. luckily it was fairly easy to climb up through the bars and get access to steps and consequently the track leading up to the castle. in fact here is young mazza herself captured breaching this last line in the kiljoys’ defences -
mazza mounts a rearward assault on kinbane castle
we had a nice clamber about on the rocks and a nosey round the ruins. to tell the truth, there wasnae much left of the castle to look at, but you could certainly see that whoever decided to build it there had a good eye for a strategic spot. perched atop a huge rock with sheer drops and raging seas on three sides, the only way to approach the castle would be across the causeway at the rear. but to get to that you’d have to negotiate your way down the steep cliffs behind. i wonder what any of the poor sods charged with attacking the castle thus in the past would have thought of the notion that the man-made path edged with a sturdy metal sturdy balustrade down which we descended was ‘too dangerous’?
we explored kinbane castle for about half an hour or so and then headed back to the car. being uphill all the way on the trek back, it was a lot more arduous than the gravity-assisted outward journey and really sorted the men from the boys! i left mazza several hundred yards behind on the slog up the cliff path again. this in spite of the fact that my knee was starting to twinge quite badly and worrying me that i might have put it through ‘too much too soon’ and would become a veritable lame duck for the rest of the holiday.
mazza left for dead by my athleticism
after this little soiré, we continued up the coast road until we got to portrush, where the next important custom was observed - the ‘fish’n'chips for tea by the sea’ tradition. although, in reality, fish was foregone in favour of pigs’ toenails and grease, as we both opted for sausage suppers. after returning from the chippy with my prize, we drove out to a carpark on the seafront where we tucked into our dietician’s nightmare, washed down with cabernet sauvignon quoffed from enamel mugs. visual splendour was provided by the atlantic breakers crashing onto the beach and visual entertainment by a group of novice surfers having a lesson. since said lesson seemed to consist of wading out to about waist deep, pushing your surf-board, then crawling gingerly onto it for about a nanosecond, before tipping off into the [freezing looking] sea, we deduced that this was definitely a ‘beginners’ class’.
dinner over, we disposed of our papers in a nearby bin [like the good citizens we are!] and hit the road again. after passing through coleraine and derry, we crossed into donegal at about 5-ish and decided to head north for a change, instead of immediately turning south towards donegal town, as i usually do. this took us in the direction of dunfanaghy. the weather had been gradually worsening for most of the afternoon and by this time it was raining quite hard and, as a consequence of the cloudy sky, beginning to get dusky quite quickly. thus, in spite of our best intentions to avoid putting ourselves in just such a situation, we were faced with the prospect of looking for a decent place to camp before the light went. we found ourselves forced into that familiar routine of driving aimlessly round the countryside looking for likely spots; forests, lakesides, seashores etc. the usual frustrations ensued - you’d see a likely looking forest in the distance and drive to it, only to find when you got there that it was either fenced off or separated from the road by an uncrossable ditch or high bank. or you’d head towards a likely looking piece of coastline, only to find it was actually someone’s sprawling estate. our meanderings took us through rathmelton, rathmullen, millford, ballymon and falcarragh [amongst others] until we ended up following a sign for a holy shrine at doon. the shrine itself turned out to be some kind of spring or well surrounded by a decorative garden and carpark. not ideal camping territory, although we did note for future reference that there were some public bogs in the area - or ‘the holy bogs of doon’, as mazza christened them.
from doon we did eventually stumble across a track leading to a reservoir. i think its name was loch keel but, again, i’m not absolutely sure. it wasnae the best spot in the world as it was basically a pretty windswept patch of grass by the side of said loch, but under the circumstances and growing more tired and irritable by the minute, we decided to call it home sweet home for the night. before finally settling on this spot tho’, we thought we’d just continue on up the track to see if anything a bit more sheltered and tent-friendly was available ’round the next corner’.
in the event, we needn’t have bothered. the track led to a gate which we went through, remembering to close it behind us [always follow the countryside code, kiddies!] and then on up past a field of cows and eventually petered out in a muddy yard full of feeding troughs, which seemed to belong to some farm. so we did a U-turn and headed back down the track towards our originally selected lochside spot. unfortunately, in the intervening time, the aforementioned cows, doubtless thinking we were the farmer coming to fill the troughs had all come out of their field and followed us up the track leaving the lane between us and the gate full of prime beef. driving slowly towards them had no effect - they just stared blankly at the car. so mazza had to heroically spring from the passenger seat and shoo them back down the lane, while i inched the motor forward as they retreated. it was all going well until they got to the entrance to their field, where all but two of them dutifully trudged back in. unfortunately this pair of especially dumb specimens continued on down the lane past the field entrance and thus became an eight-legged roadblock between the car and the gate we were trying to reach to get back to the reservoir. we didnae want to drive any further in case we panicked them and they either hurt themselves or damaged the car trying to flee past us. so, in the end, we just had to reverse back up the lane again, past the entrance to their field and wait until, eventually - after about five minutes, they wandered back up and went and rejoined their mates.
first night’s camp - pictured the following morning when it got light
back at the reservoir we made camp. putting the tent up was a bugger of a job, as the ground by the lochside was covered in cowpats which i had to clear from where we were going to put the tent, using my trusty folding shovel. then we found that it was also pretty rocky, so we couldnae get the pegs in fairly well. added to this it was, by now, pissing with rain and blowing a gale, which made manhandling the tent a bit like flying a rather large floppy blue kite. luckily there were a few trees and boulders about so we eventually managed to get the tent fairly securely erected, by hammering the pegs in as best we could and then lashing the guy ropes to the bushes and boulders [as well as to the bumper of the car].
house erected, it was time to feed our bellies. since it was pissing down we decided to cook in the back of the car. i opened the back door and draped our tarpaulin [or tom paulin, as we call it] over the door between it and the rear of the roof to make a kind of of a canopy. then i got the big box containing various bits’n'bobs out of the back of the car and stashed it underneath out of the rain. this freed up the space behind the seats, upon which mazza set up her exciting new hi-tech camping stove that she bought on the fishin’ net and began to cook tea.
we had some burgery lamb steak type things with us which we thought we’d better eat first, in case they went off. so mazza fired those up and we we had them on baps [with hot pepper sauce and cheese in my case, naturally]. they weren’t that nice really - sort of a cross between a steak and a burger - they kept sticking to the pan and breaking while being cooked, tasted very greasy and were pretty flavourless. still. at least we had some food in our bellies and the tent up, so we were still quite happy as we chomped our skanko-burgers and washed them down with bottles of smithwicks and mugs of ‘cab sauv’.
after dinner there wasnae much else to do but hit the sack. it should have been quite snuggly in the tent, listening to the wind rattling the canvas [well. it's not canvas these days - but artistic licence and all thon!] but unfortunately we’d forgot to pack the two wee roll-up mattrasses we have at home, so we had to use the single sleeping bag we had with us for a mattrass and our huge furry rug for a cover. normally this would be fine, but unfortunately the years are beginning to tell on my oul’ furry mate and we noticed that, as well as not being as ‘fluffy’ as it used to be, there were quite a few holes in it since last time we’d used it. it’s a kind of patchwork thing made of diamonds of fake fur and unfortunately it’s beginning to come apart at the seams [literally!] so we actually spent quite an uncomfortable night, fidgeting on the hard ground and enduring gusts of cold air, which after somehow sneaking into the tent, unerringly headed straight for the holes in the rug, which always seemed to be strategically placed next tot the parts of our bodies that we least liked to have caressed by icy breezes.
loch keel [?] - daylight revealed it to be quite a nice wee spot really
07 August 2005 at 18:41
Hi there! I liked your post about Kenbane. I had a wee jump over the fence a few weeks ago myself!
08 August 2005 at 11:00
i’m glad to hear the fence is still there. means you’re not likely to be swamped by hordes of tourists when you have a nosey round there. pretty impressed ypu “jumped over” it tho’ - i remember it being a good ten feet tall!