Welcome to Northern Ireland! …Or at least my blog post about Northern Ireland! This five-and-a-half-thousand square miles of the United Kingdom is home to innumerable sheep, romantic stone architecture, dramatic coastal cliffs, and that aggressively vibrant green color only found in locations with chronically dismal weather.

Leslie and I flew into Belfast and headed straight to Dunluce Castle on the northern coast of the isle of Ireland. We were greeted by the customary sheep. As cattle ranchers in the Old West would identify members of their herds by branding them, so Irish shepherds identify their wards with paint; those shown here belong to someone who uses a reddish-orange color. The first stones were laid here in the 13th century; the ruins still rise formidably straight up from the cliffs on several sides. We were excited to see the caves beneath the castle, but they were closed for renovation or preservation (or whatever you do to caves?) so we had to make due with the spectacular above-ground scenery.

(The drive from Belfast Int’l to Dunluce was my thank-goodness-not-literally-crash course intro to driving in Ireland. I will discuss this at greater length in a later blog post, but for now keep in mind that this endeavor generally takes place on the wrong side of what can’t possibly be wide enough to carry two-way traffic, but does.)

After Dunluce Castle we visited the Dark Hedges, which is a strech of Bregagh Road in County Antrim that is lined with picturesque beech trees. Due to its appearance in the second season of Game of Thrones, this place has become quite the tourist destination. The Department of Infrastructure has since closed this particular length of road to traffic, so it should be a nicer stroll now, but at the time I was lucky to get a bus-free image.

Speaking of busses, the entirety of Ireland is lousy with tour busses, and it seems most of the famously pretty sites are swarmed with tourists, at least in the summer, when Leslie and I were there. Fortunately, in the summer, the sun doesn’t set until like 10 P.M. (and likewise rises at some uncivilized hour), so if you’re willing to head out early or stay out late, you may still get the opportunity to experience some of these places in their uncluttered glory.

This is excatly what we ended up doing later that day. As we checked into our Airbnb, our host suggested we visit the Giant’s Causeway late in the evening to avoid the crowds, and she was so right. Northeast of the town of Bushmills, vast stretches of basalt columns jut right up from the sea, forming a breathtaking portion of the coastline. 50 to 60 million years ago, Paleocene volicanic activity brought quite a bit of lava to the surface here. As lava cools, it shrinks, and as it simultaneously hardens and shrinks, cracks form, causing the columnar shapes you see here. Most of the columns are hexagonal, but we saw other shapes as well. The whole thing was slippery, slightly dangerous, and absolutely stunning. It’s not hard to imagine Finn MacCool tromping out into the sea here to fight some Scottish giant. Rain contributed to the slippery danger (you can see that I have deployed the rain fly of my Lowepro Flipside Sport 20L AW), but it didn’t deter us!

The Causeway Hotel was super cool; I half expected to see characters from Mad Men lounging in the lobby. If we’d had more time, we would have definitely eaten and stayed there.

The following morning we wandered down Benone Beach (yet another picturesque portion of Ireland’s northern coast) to the Downhill Demense near Castlerock. Both the sand of the beach and the cliffs above it teemed with life; each step brought into view some new critter or evidence of such burrowing around beneath the surface. In addition to being riddled with caves, the cliffs thronged with seagulls (more seagulls than tourists, even!), and at one point we had to make a dash across an open stretch of sand to avoid getting splattered with guano from above.

Downhill Demense is home to Mussenden “Temple”, a round building perched atop the cliffs overlooking Benone Beach. It was built as a library in 1875 and meant to resemble the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum. A few hundred feet south along an arrow-straight track lies the castley ruins of Downhill House, also built in the 18th century.

That evening we made the short drive to Dublin and the Republic of Ireland, where our story shall continue.

—narrative assistance by Dan