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BALLYCASTLE |
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The lively market town and port of BALLYCASTLE sits at the mouth of
the two northernmost Antrim glens, Glenshesk and Glentaisie , and makes
a pleasant base for exploring the Causeway Coast or the glens themselves,
especially if you find yourself passing through at the time of the
Fleadh Amhrán agus Rince three-day music and dance festival in June, the
cross-community Northern Lights Festival in mid-August, or the Ould
Lammas Fair held on the last Monday and Tuesday in August. This last
event is more than just a tourist promotion: Ireland's oldest fair, it
dates from 1606 when the MacDonnells first obtained a charter, and has
sheep and pony sales as well as the obligatory stalls and shops.
Stallholders do a roaring trade in dulse , an edible seaweed, and
yellowman , a tooth-breaking yellow toffee that's so hard it needs a
hammer to break it up. Both of these delicacies feature in a sentimental
song that originates locally:
Did you treat your Mary Ann
To dulse and yellowman
At the Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle-O?
Ballycastle has a solid, prosperous feel about it that derives from the
efforts of an enlightened mid-eighteenth-century landowner, Colonel Hugh
Boyd, who developed it as an industrial centre, providing coal and iron
ore mines, a tannery, brewery, soap, bleach, salt and glass works. The
town's prosperity, though, really depended on its coal mines ; lignite
was mined at Ballintoy, on the coast a few miles further west, an
enterprise which came to an abrupt end in the eighteenth century when
the entire deposit caught fire and burned for several years. More
recently, the harbour area was redeveloped to cater for the now-defunct
ferry to Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre, though, fortunately,
Morton's fresh fish shop has been left intact. Boats leave from here
also to Rathlin Island .
At the seafront there's a memorial to Guglielmo Marconi , the inventor
of the wireless, who in 1898 made his first successful radio
transmission between Ballycastle and Rathlin. From the seafront, Quay
Road leads gradually uphill past houses and shops to the Diamond , the
town's focus. Up the steeper Castle Street hill, the town's tiny museum
(July & Aug daily noon-6pm; free) occupies the old eighteenth-century
courthouse. Temporary exhibitions are hosted upstairs, while, downstairs
in the former cells, there's a small and somewhat poignant collection of
artefacts produced by the pre-World War I Irish Home Industries Shop.
Pride of place goes to the Glentaisie banner for the first Feis na
nGleann in 1904.
A little way out of town, on the main road to Cushendall, are the ruins
of Bonamargy Friary , founded by the dominant MacQuillan family around
1500. One family member, Julia, insisted on being buried in the main
walkway, so that she might be humbled by the stepping feet of others
even in death. A number of the rival MacDonnell family are also buried
here, including the hero of Dunluce Castle, Sorley Boy MacDonnell, and
his son Randal, first Earl of Antrim . An indication of the strength of
the Irish language in these parts is that the tomb of the second earl,
who died in 1682, is inscribed in Irish as well as the usual English and
Latin: the Irish inscription reads "Every seventh year a calamity
befalls the Irish" and "Now that the Marquis has departed, it will occur
every year". The Margy river , on which Bonamargy Friary stands, is
associated with one of the great tragic stories of Irish legend, that of
the Children of Lir , whose jealous stepmother turned them into swans
and forced them to spend three hundred years on the Sea of Moyle (the
narrow channel between Ireland and the Scottish coast). Also on the
stretch of shore near Ballycastle is Carraig Uisneach , the rock on
which the mythical Deirdre of the Sorrows, her lover Naoise, and his
brothers, the sons of Uisneach, are said by some to have come ashore
after their long exile in Scotland .
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