Practical Caravan

GREAT ESCAPES

Great Escapes: Ireland

Following the Wild Atlantic Way

Photography: Phil Russell

Claudia Dowell and Kate Taylor track the coastline of Ireland’s most northern county in the hope of spotting a whale

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Knocknarea Mountain provides the backdrop to a drive along Rosses Point in Co Sligo

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GREAT ESCAPES

Great Escapes: Ireland

‘There are loughs everywhere, and they and the mountains dictate how you get around’

Enniskillen Castle in Co Fermanagh now

Claudia and Kate try to keep trim with Rushin

does service as the county’s museum

House’s newly installed outdoor gym

, Ballyness Caravan Park

Dunfanaghy , Wild Atlantic Camp

“

D

id you seE it, Kate?” Through the window of our Stena Line ferry I had spotted a seal swimming away just as the boat was coming into Dublin port. She had.

This sighting was thrilling; during our trip I was hoping to spot the big one, a whale.

Failing that, a dolphin or even another seal would be the icing on the cake for my long overdue visit to Ireland. And it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, either. Our mission was to follow the Wild Atlantic Way, a designation given to Ireland’s west coast roads, and we were focusing on those of Donegal. We would also follow a little of the north coast of Northern Ireland, so we could take in the Giant’s Causeway.

Fannad Head

Giant’s Causeway

Carrick-a-Rede A2

Creeslough Glenveagh Castle

A29

N15

Donegal N56

A5 A32

Slieve League

Enniskillen

A4

, Rushin House Lough Melvin straddles A5

the border of Northern Ireland and Ireland and is typical of the area’s lough-mountain scenery

My colleague Kate and I had a lot to fit in and our first stop was the much-lauded Rushin House Caravan Park at Belcoo in Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, right on the Irish Republic’s border. Our ferry had landed at just after 5pm and it took us the best part of three hours to cross County Cavan to reach Rushin House. Our welcome from site owners Cathal and Brenda O’Dolan was warm and we had our pick of the pitches.

Once the steadies were down and the electrics plugged in, we abandoned all other chores and headed to the nearest restaurant.

We had been on the road since 6am, and gratefully sank into the comfy chairs of the Customs House in Belcoo and ordered.

I asked for sea bass with bacon mash, and

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Kate plumped for roast chicken with bacon and colcannon (mash with cabbage or kale).

We returned to our Sterling replete but exhausted, quickly made up the front double for Kate and fell into our respective nests.

Rushin House is one of two regular Northern Ireland Top 100 Sites finalists and we could see why Practical Caravan readers hold it in such high regard. The views of Lough MacNean from every pitch are stunning. As Kate and I began our morning with the chores we hadn’t managed the night before, Cathal arrived bearing a gift of freshly baked wheaten bread made by the same restaurant we had been in the night before. Its slightly sweet, cakey consistency gave us the sugar shot we needed to take on our first day.

It was difficult to get going with any urgency. We spent time gazing out over the lough and having a go, with some hilarity, on the site’s outdoor gym. We eventually went to Belcoo for supplies, then drove across the bridge and the border – it’s that close – into the village of Blacklion in County Cavan to have a peak at MacNean’s Restaurant there, run by Irish celebrity chef Nevan Maguire.

We took a wistful look at the menu, but dinner there was beyond our budget.

We settled on a drive around the area.

Co Fermanagh is Northern Ireland’s Lake District – there are loughs everywhere, and they and the mountains dictate how you get around the county. The hills are home to the Marble Arch Caves (http://bit.ly/MBIP5i),

, Greenlands

Marble Arch Caves Blacklion

a fantastic underground complex just a 15-minute drive from the caravan site. The caves and the nearby Cuilcagh Mountain Park form the only UNESCO Global Geopark in Northern Ireland.

A tour of the caves begins with a boat ride on an underground lake but Cathal had advised us that there had been so much rain that it wouldn’t be possible to do it.

That evening we headed into Enniskillen for dinner, stopping briefly to take a photo of the town’s 600-year-old castle, which now serves as the county’s museum, before finding a parking spot in town. We came across the Dollakis Greek restaurant on Cross Street, which turned out to be great fun and very good value.

The Wild Atlantic Way

Greenlands Caravan and Camping Park at Rosses Point in Co Sligo marked the beginning of our Wild Atlantic Way adventure. The site has wonderful views of mounts Benbulben and Knocknarea, and Oyster and Coney Islands. Once we’d settled on our pitch, we went down to investigate the beach. It was a beautiful day, the beach was vast and sandy, and it was good to stretch our legs.

I’d read about the cliffs at Slieve League, about 2.5 hours drive from Rosses Point in Co Donegal, and I was keen to take in the views from Europe’s highest sea cliffs. If I was going to spot a whale this was the place to do it, I reckoned. We followed the N15

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GREAT ESCAPES as far as Ballyshannon then spotted a sign to Belleek and the world-famous pottery there. Both Kate and I were familiar with the basket-style porcelain ware and were interested to have a look. The pottery, which was set up in 1857, is in quite a grand building that also houses a visitor centre, a museum and tearooms. You can take a guided tour but we only had time to look around the museum and the shop for gifts. Sadly, those baskets cost way beyond what was in our purses and we left empty-handed.

We passed through the town of Donegal and continued on to Killybegs, which is famous for its carpet factory and fishing industry. We parked by the port and watched the boats for a while.

Co Donegal has 13 Blue Flag beaches and we came across one on our route at Fintra Strand; the descent to the beach was steep but it was so worth it, just to walk on that vast, sandy expanse and take in the view. At the viewpoint at Muckross we stopped and had coffee from a flask that Kate had thoughtfully provided – progress was slow along this Wild Atlantic Way, stopping and starting just couldn’t be helped.

Great Escapes: Ireland Murder, she wrote

The ascent to Slieve League is steep. About two-thirds of the way up we came across a Dutch film unit filming a scene involving a wheelchair, a Sterling Europa, a hearse and a black E-Type Jag with a hose attached to its exhaust pipe. Mmm, was it murder or suicide?

At the top were a tea hut and benches.

We treated ourselves to ice cream, while I scanned the Atlantic for sea mammals – not a sausage. We knew none of the history of the cliffs around us but their magnitude was awesome. I picked up a glittering rock as a souvenir and we made our descent.

It was time to move on to our third site.

We drove north following the N56. It was a long tow but with the Atlantic to our left and mountains to our right we eventually bowled into the aptly named Wild Atlantic Camp in Creeslough. The pitches here are tight – probably better suited to motorhomes – but we soon got sorted. The town, like us, looked sleepy but there was a chippy franchise on the site. We bought fish and chips to take back to the van and, mustering all our remaining strength, opened a bottle of wine.

The dramatic cliffs at Slieve League are said to be the highest sea cliffs in Europe.

It’s a great spot for an ice cream

FROM TOP Film crew working on a drama at Slieve League. The ascent from the beach at Fintra Bay was very steep

‘If I was going to spot a whale this was the place to do it, I reckoned’

Glenveagh Castle’s gorgeous gardens were begun in the 1880s. Among the castle’s famous visitors was Greta Garbo, who used this bedroom

Claudia looks for whales at Rosses Point, where wreckage from the Spanish Armada has been found

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The Wild Atlantic Camp has only been open six months and, aside from the chippy, its best feature is the wonderful children’s playground, which has a zip wire that we were assured would take our adult weights.

It had to be done.

The whale spotting had not been going well and we needed to shrink our horizons for a day: we turned to retail therapy and retraced our steps to the fishing town of Dunfanaghy, which we had passed through the night before. The small town did us proud: we wandered around craft and antique shops, spent money in the deli, pondered over dresses in a frock shop and had lunch in a café next to the hotel. When the tide was out we watched a riding school cross the sandy bay. We felt refreshed and

ready for our next conquest, inland this time: Glenveagh Castle.

Greta Garbo holidayed here

The drive to the castle through Glenveagh National Park was spectacular, we were surrounded by the mountains of Derryveagh, and the driving rain only served to add to the mystery of the place. It felt like a real adventure. Would we make it? From the castle’s visitor centre, we caught the bus up to the house. The castle’s origins are rather shocking: to build it and the estate, wealthy businessman John Adair evicted more than 240 tenants from their homes. When he died, his American widow, Cornelia, developed the beautiful gardens. It was owned by more Americans from the 1930s

until the mid-’70s and was visited by Greta Garbo, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.

We wandered the lush, dripping-wet gardens before joining a tour of the house, with special permission to take photos of its lovely interior and particularly of Garbo’s blue bedroom. Twin beds, I noted.

A different route back to Dunfanaghy took us past Co Donegal’s highest mountain, Erigal, and the mysteriously named Poison Glen at Dunlewey. It’s a famous beauty spot but with the rain lashing around the car we viewed it from afar and returned to Dunfanaghy for dinner and a night out listening to music before slipping back to the van for a good night’s sleep.

Back on the Atlantic trail we popped down to the lovely Blue Blag beach at Marble Hill

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GREAT ESCAPES

Great Escapes: Ireland

Why we

Inset Kate buys ice cream and coffee at the

stayed at…

beautiful little caravancum-café at Marble Hill’s Blue Flag beach, while Claudia scours the

Rushin House

rock pools for treasure

A great location and well-arranged pitches giving wonderful views over Lough MacNean make this site outstanding.

But all that is nothing if you don’t have a spotless washblock,

Been to this site?

Write a review, and get automatic entry into our monthly prize draw!

says owner Cathal O’Dolan. It does.

We also loved the

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outdoor gym and the play area.

Address Belcoo, Co Fermanagh, NI Tel 028 6638 6519 Web www.rushinhousecaravanpark.com Open March-October

Greenlands Caravan and Camping Park One giant step for womankind: Kate conquers a hill of basalt columns at the Giant’s Causeway

Stay right by the sea at this site.

Families will love it; there are two safe, sandy beaches, a golf course and a sailing club all within 100 yards.

There’s a terrific play area, a TV lounge, a great campers’ kitchen and an excellent washblock.

Address Rosses Point, Co Sligo, Ireland Tel 00 353 (0)71 9177 113 Web www.greenlandscaravanpark.com Open Easter to mid-September

‘I was back on whale watch and we were heading towards Fannad Head’

Wild Atlantic Camp A new, neat-as-a-pin site with a brilliant playground and on-site chippy, it has glamping pods, too, for non-touring friends. The washroom is spotless but showers have curtains rather than doors, so they’re not very private.

Address Main Street, Creeslough, Co Donegal, Ireland Tel 00 353 (0)74 9138 400 Web www.wildatlanticcamp.com

The lighthouse at Fannad Head guards the entrance to Lough Swilly, the main Atlantic base for the Allied fleet during World War II

for a rummage around the rock pools and a cone from the beautifully decked out caravan selling ice cream and coffee.

Travelling east along the R245, we passed the stunningly located Doe Castle on its peninsula in Sheep Haven Bay. I was back on whale watch and we were heading towards Fannad Head. We followed the R246 around Mullroy Bay, hugging the coastline.

During our travels we had noticed that, although the architecture in Ireland was rather functional, people took great pride over the entrances to their homesteads. One modest house had statues of lions protecting its gates and if you’d got past those there were a further two of life-sized rearing horses to contend with. What was inside the building, I wondered.

Two heads are better than one

The present lighthouse at Fannad Head has been guarding the entrance to Lough Swilly since 1866. The lough was the main Atlantic base for the Allied fleet during World War II and I was hoping it might be harbouring a dolphin or two but it was difficult to get near to the edge to see. Fencing surrounded the lighthouse and neither of us was keen to breach it. Perhaps we’d have better luck at mainland Ireland’s most northerly point, Malin Head.

“They should be here, but they haven’t shown up yet,” said the chap manning Banba’s mobile espresso bar at Malin Head.

Porpoises, bottlenose dolphins and minke whales are reasonably common, apparently, but where were they? I scanned the horizons

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on both sides of the point looking for a fin – nada! Just words spelled out in stones and pebbles decorating the headland. There’s a rather ugly building, too, which is a watchtower built to guard against invasion

by France during the Napoleonic Wars and later used as a communications tower during both World Wars.

Malin Head is part of the poetry of the shipping forecast, so now I can have the place in my head as I drift off to sleep with the radio on.

It had been a long drive back to base at Creeslough and now we were breaking camp and leaving Co Donegal for Bushmills and the second of our Top 100 Sites Northern Ireland finalists, Ballyness Caravan Park.

The only really visible indication that you

Words laid out in stones spell out Éire and Donegal at Ireland’s most northerly mainland point

are crossing the border is when the road markings change from yellow to white.

In the footsteps of giants

The immaculate Ballyness is on the bus route for two of Northern Ireland’s most important attractions – the Giant’s Causeway and the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. We could take a day off from driving – hurrah! Buses leave hourly from outside reception and take less than 10 minutes to get to the Causeway and half an hour to reach the rope bridge. Don’t get caught out as we did for the return journey: there’s a two-hour gap after 2pm in both directions.

We began with the Causeway, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and managed by the National Trust. The modern visitor

centre houses a shop, café and plenty of information about the formation of this geological wonder. There are four walking trails to the Causeway or, if you prefer, you can hop on the shuttle bus.

The interlocking basalt columns truly are an awesome sight. There are 40,000, apparently – who counted them? You need stout shoes and good balance to clamber over them so I was astonished to see a young woman tackling the slippery surfaces in flipflops – am I showing my age? Clearly, because Kate bounded up a hill of pillars with comparative ease, while I was too busy staying upright to manage my audio guide.

However, I did learn that the Causeway is the result of volcanic eruptions and cooling lava of 60 million years ago.

Open All year

Ballyness Caravan Park This is a brilliant site, ideally placed for visiting the Giant’s Causeway, Carricka-Rede rope bridge and the Bushmills Distillery. The playground is state of the art, while the wildlife ponds provide a quiet area. The site has a solar panel garden to provide its own electricity.

The washblock is immaculate and has a family bathroom. Reception doubles as a shop and the bus stops here for the Causeway and rope bridge.

Address 40 Castlecatt Road, Bushmills, Co Antrim BT57 8TN Tel O28 2073 2393 Web ballynesscaravanpark.com Open Mid-March to end of October

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GREAT ESCAPES

Your trip planner

‘I felt as if I was in a small boat on high seas’

All the vital statistics and further info When to go We travelled in May and had mixed weather, but it didn’t matter. Most sites are open from March to October. If you plan to walk in the mountains, I would stick to the summer months.

Way to go Stena Line Ferries’ Holyhead to Dublin Port crossing takes 3 hours 15 minutes.

A Stena Line Ferry from Liverpool to Belfast takes eight hours (www.stena line.co.uk/ferries-to-ireland). Follow the N56 for a tour of Co Donegal

Our outfit We towed the Sterling Eccles Sport 514 (on loan from Cookstown Caravans, cookstowncaravans.com) with a Land Rover Discovery 4 3.0-litre (hired from belfast@4x4vehiclehire.co.uk)

Food and drink Customs House Good food, great atmosphere.

25-27 Main Street, Belcoo, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, NI BT93 5FB Tel +44 (0)28 6638 6285 Web www.customshouseinn.com Nirvana Restaurant Casual dining, good food.

Made it! The National Trust’s Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge crosses a 20m wide x 30m deep chasm

The Mall, Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, Ireland Tel +353 71 982 2369 Web www.nirvanarestaurant.ie Dollakis Fabulous food and reasonably priced.

2b Cross Street, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, NI BT74 7DX Tel 028 6634 2616 Web www.dollakis.com Arnolds Hotel The café does great lunches.

Main Street, Dunfanaghy, Ireland Tel 00 353 (0)74 9136 208 Web www.arnoldshotel.com

Find out more For NI sites try Caravan Sitefinder http://bit.ly/SCak1i. For Ireland try The Green Guide Touring Caravan and Camping Parks http://bit.ly/1nyiZgF Visit Ireland http://bit.ly/1pLUTQ4 Discover Northern Ireland www.discovernorthernireland.com

We stopped at the centre for a tasty lunch of Irish stew and debated whether we should catch the bus back to Bushmills and visit the famous distillery there (Claudia-I’m-partialto-a-good-whiskey’s choice) or carry on to the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge (Kate-I’malways-up-for-an-adventure’s choice). We didn’t have time for both. I had to concede, we had come all this way and it would be a shame not to cross the rope bridge.

The National Trust also manages Carricka-Rede, and it’s a one-kilometre walk from the NT ticket hut to the rope bridge – and I’m not talking on the flat. This was a challenging up-and-down hike involving steep steps and resting points. The bridge loomed – have I mentioned I haven’t a good head for heights?

Only eight people are allowed on at a time and there’s a reassuring notice that the bridge is inspected annually – is that all?

Kate crossed the 20m-wide chasm with ease. I held on tight as the bridge suddenly adopted a wave motion – there was a large, boisterous man bouncing along behind me – I felt as if I was in a small boat on high seas.

Of course, the only way off Carrick-a-Rede

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Island is back across the bridge and I did my utmost to not share the return crossing with Bouncy Boisterous Man. When you’ve made it back to the NT ticket hut you can be issued with a certificate to say you did it. I was more interested in a cuppa at the café, particularly because we had to wait that extra hour for the bus back to camp.

Our ferry from Dublin was early in the morning; why hadn’t we arranged to leave from Belfast? We had to hitch up and get going fast. We had arranged to stay overnight in Donard, Co Wicklow – not the most convenient site but a great find nonetheless – and we weren’t going to get there until 10pm. We phoned ahead to Moat Farm full of apologies, and when we arrived we couldn’t have been received more kindly. We made an early start the next day and were glad we did because we got lost looking for the port.

On the Stena Line ferry, we relaxed and listened to the banter of a group of Australian tourists. Kate and I had to agree with them that Ireland is incredibly beautiful and populated by the warmest, friendliest people, but not one dorsal fin did we see. PC