Category: Northern Ireland

A short hop into headwind and drizzle to the notional end of the End to End: Giant’s Causeway. The natural wonder consists of 40,000 hexagonal columns of basalt – the same sort of volcanic stuff the moon is made of – looking like a clumsily-laid giant’s garden patio. Visiting by bike isn’t all that convenient…

Yet more tailwinds helping us on to Larne, where a shouty, belligerent local was furious that we didn’t follow his unsolicited directions. It was the last unpleasant thing of the day, though: from here is one of the loveliest stretches of coastal road in the United Kingdom that Mr Shouty was so keen on belonging…

We circumnavigated the bottom of scenic Ards peninsula, and north through shore towns with Union Flags and kerbstones painted red, white and blue. We took and coffee and light lunch in Newtownards, a friendly little loyalist town, with its pipe band braying benignly away benignly in the market-stall square. A local chap admired my Raleigh….

Whatever your position on its relation to Great Britain or Ireland, and whether you call it a country or a region or a province, Northern Ireland has its own football team, which is enough to justify it for me as a standalone End to End country. I did it with my chum Nigel, on a…