One of the great benefits to being in a (mostly) English-speaking country (some accents are impenetrable) is the ability for monolingual me to communicate. Based on my firm grasp of my native tongue, I’m able to get local recommendations from, well, locals. That superpower is what led me to tour the Inishowen Peninsula yesterday. Today I knew we were going to tour the northern coast (the Antrim Coast), but I added a stop to our agenda based on the recommendation of our B and B host, who had asked after what we were doing today. He said stopping at Downhill to see the bishop’s house (Downhill House) and temple would be worthwhile, and he was right.

It took about an hour to get to Downhill, and we arrived in a soft misting rain. We could see a large ruin of a house on the top of a rise, but we walked into the walled garden instead, based almost solely on the presence of bathrooms on the far side of the garden. There was little to see in the garden — it is mainly the home of several apple trees and picnic tables — but it did get us to the bathrooms and a pretty dovecote (a house for doves), and, more importantly, it took us to a side path that bypassed the ruined house and took us to the Mussenden Temple, which the Earl-Bishop had built as a library to house his books. Fun fact — because of the damp of Ireland, he had a fire going year-round in the basement of the temple to keep his books dry.

The temple is built to look like a Greek temple in miniature, and it sits right on the edge of a rather dramatic sea cliff overlooking a couple of miles of beaches. It used to be further from the cliff (they could drive a carriage around it), but the cliff eroded, and it’s only a few feet now from the edge. The rain had stopped for us, but the wind was whipping, and the waves were crashing impressively into the beach. The temple was connected by a long path to the main house, which is where we headed. The back of the house looked like a castle with battlements. There were a few cars and trucks in the entrance for workers, and so that way was closed. I thought the house would be closed, but we wanted to see the front. Sydney and Julia took a crushed gravel path around to the right, and Mer and I took the wetter but less windy way around to the left, and we met in the front, which was decorated in a Georgian style (think classical homes) instead of like the castle in back. The main stairs to the house were intact, and the front of the house was open. In we went.

The house had been lived in until the 1920s, and was used as a barracks during World War II, and was finally abandoned in 1945. So it’s been less than eighty years since the place was given up, and there is now no roof anywhere, no windows, no doors, no upper floors, no stairs, and even some of the walls are missing. It always amazes me how quickly a house “knows” no one is living there and falls apart. Still, the house was picturesque and grand in a ruined way, and several of the rooms were still labeled as to what they were, and we think based on open space that the house must have had a large interior courtyard. We wandered around quite a bit before heading back to the car. It had been a great recommendation.

We drove on to a highlight of the coast and one of Julia’s bucket-list items, the Giant’s Causeway. The Causeway is a series of forty thousand hexagon-shaped columns that protrude up from the ground between the cliffs and down into the sea. The Causeway was obviously built as a bridge by the giant Finn McCool to go fight a Scottish giant so that Finn wouldn’t have to get wet on the trip over. There are even similar rocks in Scotland, so that’s proof positive of the causeway’s having been giant-built.

We had a tip from the internet, backed by the recommendation of our host, to park at the Causeway Hotel instead of at the next-door visitors’ center. The hotel charges ten pounds for parking, and the receipt acts as a voucher for ten pounds off eating in the tearoom, which we knew we would do, so it was like free parking. You can walk from the parking lot to the road to the Causeway by walking over the green-space roof of the visitors’ center, and you can even use free restrooms on the hotel grounds. It’s an amazing deal when you consider that the official parking lot charges 12.50 pounds per person, or, in our case, a staggering total of almost fifty pounds (sixty-three dollars). Somehow the Rick Steves guidebook didn’t mention this hotel lot option, so I mention it instead.

We chose to walk down the road/sidewalk to the Causeway. There is a bus that costs one pound each, but we all wanted to see the sights along the way, and we would take the bus back up the hill. That was the right choice. The path slowly revealed different parts of the coast, and the waves were mighty. I asked a ranger, on a scale of one to ten, how active the sea was today. He said, “On a scale of one to ten, don’t go in.” The waves were great.

We took a ton of photos on the way down and then got to the causeway. There are three causeways, with the first being shorter and smaller, the middle being bigger and longer, and the last one being huge – both tall and long. We all climbed on the first one, and went down to the last one. Sydney, in her words, “chose life” and sat on a bench looking at the pretty. Meredith, Julia, and I climbed up to where two rangers were standing, chatted with them a bit, and then walked out to near the end of the causeway. While were were out there, the wind picked up even more. It was a wild place. We stayed for a bit, and then made our way back just as it started to rain again, this time a little harder. We got on the bus and headed back to the top of the hill, where we left the visitors’ center crowd and made our way to the tearoom. It was warm and cozy and decked out for Christmas, and we got some light food (scones and cookie bars) that were delightful. In all, our parking and food came in around thirty-three pounds, or seventeen pounds less than parking alone would have been in a different parking lot. We were very pleased.

It was getting late now, around 3:00, and we headed off to the next sight, the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge, which is a rope bridge to a scenic island. I figured it would be so, but the bridge was closed because of high winds, and we weren’t even allowed down to see it. I reset the tourist compass to go south about twenty minutes, to go to the Dark Hedges. The Hedges are a dual row of trees on each side of a road, and they are thick and tall enough to cover the road over. It’s a pretty sight on its own (it’s been featured twice on our Ireland page-a-day calendar), but it was also the backdrop for an important scene in the fantasy show Game of Thrones, of which Julia is a huge fan. She was pretty excited. Sadly, part of the road was closed for construction, but we still got to see much of it, and got a few fan photos for Julia. That was satisfying.

The drive back to Derry was long, as it was in the dark and had on-and-off rain, but we got home a little before 6:00. After regrouping (and letting me calm my frazzled driving nerves), we headed out for supper at an excellent restaurant just inside the old city walls, but on the far side (from us) part of the walls. After supper, Mer and I walked the walls the long way around to see them at night, and Julia and Sydney went home the quicker way.

Since the walls dumped us only a block from the pub to which we had been last night, I suggested we check it out again to see if there was different music on tonight. There was, and so we took a seat at the end of the bar, and we were happily confused. Last night the crowd was there to talk and to drink, and several parties were quite tipsy and loud. Tonight, the crowd was quiet and mostly listening to the music, and no one seemed to be drinking too much. My theory is that for the pub, the “weekend” is from Thursday to Tuesday, so we hit it on a quieter working night. We stayed for about half an hour and heard two different songs about Derry that we knew, as well as a Scottish song and several covers of American songs. It’s an odd thing to watch two middle-aged Irish women waltz to “Rhinestone Cowboy” in a pub, but it was a fun way to end the evening. After all, always trust the locals — they know more than you do.