Coast (2005) s01e06 Episode Script

The Northern Ireland Coast

I'm going to let you in on a secret.
A secret stretch of coast - probably the most misunderstood part of our journey around the edge of the United Kingdom.
We're going to show you what a whole generation has missed.
A coastline blessed by beauty, but blighted by conflict.
We're in Northern Ireland and like many people, my knowledge about this place is based largely upon what I've seen on the news, and it's not always been good news.
But its troubled reputation might have helped protect this coastline, saving it from some of the aggressive aspects of tourism.
Now Northern Ireland's on the up and up, and the transformation's unfolding here - by the sea.
This is the story of a coast gearing up to be rediscovered.
To help me tell that story, I'm joined by a team of specialists.
Writer and historian, Neil Oliver, relives the building of Belfast's most famous ship.
Anthropologist, Alice Roberts, explores giant stepping stones that gave birth to the science of geology.
Zoologist, Miranda Krestovnikoff, gets swept away by the secrets of the UK's largest inland sea.
Archaeologist, Mark Horton, goes in search of Spanish gold .
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while I travel along the only road in the UK that really hugs the sea, and cuts through some of the darkest moments in Irish history.
This is the story of Coast.
This leg of our journey takes us 185 miles from Carlingford Lough, on the border with the Irish Republic, through Belfast and on to Lough Foyle.
It's a jigsaw puzzle of rugged cliffs, long white sandy beaches, and immense sea loughs.
A coastline spewed from volcanoes, sculpted by ice and etched by people.
People who live in the United Kingdom, and have for the past 84 years been separated from the rest of Ireland by a border.
Here at the head of Carlingford Lough, that border runs somewhere along the middle of this narrow channel.
And that's where our journey begins.
I'm a few metres inside the Republic of Ireland, and this placid stretch of water is all that separates me from Northern Ireland.
Just over there is a place which will be forever associated with the region's turbulent past - Warrenpoint.
Although it's now three and a half hours since the double bomb explosion which killed the soldiers, the army still can't allow anyone within half a mile of the scene for their own safety.
It is know that In August 1979, Warrenpoint made headlines when two IRA bombs were detonated by this roadside.
18 British soldiers were killed, 16 of them paratroopers.
It was the Parachute Regiment's greatest single loss of life since the Battle of Arnhem during the Second World War.
It happened just hours after another IRA bomb had killed the Queen's cousin, Earl Louis Mountbatten of Burma.
He died when his boat was blown up off the west coast of Ireland.
These coordinated attacks were a defining moment in the conflict.
No-one could now doubt the ruthless capability of the IRA.
You might easily miss this memorial at Warrenpoint, but the bitter shockwaves from these killings weren't so easily forgotten.
There was another 18 years of bloodshed before a lasting ceasefire was finally achieved.
Warrenpoint was just one more chapter in the long and bloody story of Northern Ireland's coast.
There's more evidence that this waterway has attracted conflict for centuries.
400 years ago, English settlers, protecting themselves against the native Irish, built this defensive tower house.
2,000 years before that, Celtic tribes fought over this shoreline.
Invaded by Vikings, fortified by Normans, and forcibly settled by successive waves of English and Scots, a troubled coast long before the events of the last 40 years.
The history of violence on this coast contrasts so starkly with its beauty.
This is where our journey turns north, and follows the shoreline of County Down.
We're heading towards a great inland sea - Strangford Lough.
Flanking the coast are Northern Ireland's highest mountains - the Mournes.
Nestling below the tallest of the Mournes 12 granite peaks, is the seaside resort of Newcastle.
Up until the 1950s, thousands of families flocked here to enjoy their annual holiday.
But the loss of its rail link to Belfast, cheap foreign holidays, and the impact of the Troubles ruined this tourist destination.
Today, Newcastle is a town intent on picking itself up and grasping the peace dividend.
Further along this coast, it's a similar story at Dundrum.
A sleepy village built in the shadow of its Norman castle.
Another victim of economic fallout from years of violence, Dundrum is also planning for better times, but even this isn't trouble-free.
Now a new kind of struggle has flared up.
With its obvious potential for development, this coast faces the same difficult choices that confront all areas of great natural beauty.
There's a row going on between developers and conservationists over new holiday homes and apartments on the shore.
To some, they represent the future.
To others, they're just a blot on the landscape.
That struggle's being repeated all along this coastline.
The Troubles kept visitors away, now there's a rush to invest and things are happening in a hurry.
The danger is that the fruits of peace could destroy the natural beauty that attracts people in the first place.
And this is one of the most attractive spots - Strangford Lough.
Strangford Lough is a vast inland sea - the largest saltwater lough in the United Kingdom, with 120 islands and 150 miles of its own twisting coastline.
This huge body of water is tidal, connected to the sea by a narrow channel.
Twice a day, fierce currents surge through this bottleneck.
The tide's pouring in from the open sea, and you can feel it trying to push the ferry into the lough.
The tidal torrent is the life blood of this exceptional environment.
The World Wildlife Fund say Strangford is one of the most important wild places in Europe.
And no wonder.
There are over 2,000 marine species here - that's three quarters of all the plants and animals found in Northern Ireland.
For our zoologist, Miranda Krestovnikoff, the fierce currents in the lough will make Strangford a very difficult dive.
350 million cubic metres of sea water flood though the lough every tide.
This twice-daily pulse of water is a living soup.
It's packed full of microscopic life that fuels the food chain in the lough.
Surging water also makes life difficult in the deep.
Wait! The current just takes you.
This current's moving too fast! I'm going to try and get out of the current a bit, and have a closer look at the marine life.
We've got fairly bad visibility.
That green colour is a bloom of plankton.
That's good news for the animals, because that's the food they feed on.
There are loads of filter-feeders around here.
Anchored to the seabed, they are spoon-fed by the tide.
Anything in the current will be swept away so the only way to stay still - really hunker down on the seabed.
You can just see between the timbers of this old wreck, a beautiful conger eel, really blue with big eyes.
It's a big fish and the only way it can really survive is by hiding and waiting for food to come to it.
Its rich marine life makes Strangford Lough ripe for exploitation.
Dredging for scallops and prawns has already destroyed miles of the seabed.
The bottom is scraped bare, leaving a lifeless underwater desert.
Though dredging is currently banned, the commercial pressure is unrelenting, and it might be permitted again if the environment recovers.
Strangford Lough is a fragile ecosystem, despite its size.
It stretches inland for 20 miles.
Here it changes into a placid, shallow sea.
The falling tide reveals enormous mud flats, literally full of life.
You can see the worm casts and a few shells and cockles on the surface, but I guess there's moredown? Yes, definitely.
We have got loads of life in the mud flats themselves.
If we take a chunk out and see what is in there.
Look at that! There is a fantastic bloodworm burrow there.
There's a ragworm.
There's quite a lot moving as well.
You can see it is teeming with life, and this is what supports all of the different species of birds.
Over 70,000 birds come here every winter for the rich pickings.
The most important visitors are light-bellied Brent geese.
It's over three quarters of the world's population that come down from the Arctic.
You can see on the surface the eel grass, and that is a really important food source for the geese.
They come specifically to Strangford Lough, and that is why this is so important internationally, because if it wasn't here, the Brent geese wouldn't survive to breed during the summer.
But there's trouble here too.
Local farmers have ploughed up a large area of eel grass, destroying a vital food source for the migrating geese.
This destruction took place even though Strangford Lough is ring-fenced with every protection available.
A Special Area Of Conservation, a European Area Of Special Protection, an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and a Site Of Special Scientific Interest, and it's still not enough.
Belfast is only 12 miles away, with its commuters hungry for housing in such a lovely setting.
The threat of pollution from overdevelopment hangs over the whole lough.
In an ideal world, what would you like to change for the future? It would be great if Strangford Lough was made a Marine National Park, because we don't have any yet in the UK and if it was one of the first, that would be fantastic but it would also raise awareness of how special it is and it is a place that needs to be protected really well.
I find it sadly disappointing that the UK has no Marine National Parks.
Surely it's time we started to effectively legislate to protect our sea, as well as our land? We're just a few miles from Strangford, where 400 years ago, immigrants were flooding through small ports on Ulster's east coast .
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a momentous migration that radically changed the history of Ireland.
That's Scotland - less than 20 miles away.
Scotland's close proximity to Northern Ireland's eastern shore is crucial.
In the early 1600s, tens of thousands of Scots made the short crossing to settle in this part of County Down.
All Protestants, they spoke neither Scots Gaelic nor English, but a form of Lowland Scots, called Lallans.
Lallans is a coastal tongue.
It's better known as Ulster-Scots, and it's been formally recognised by the European Union as a minority language.
Even the street signs are bilingual.
HE READS SLOWLY As you can tell, I'm not a native speaker.
Before the language arrived, this corner of Ireland was still beyond English control.
Worse for an England now ferociously Protestant, Ulster was predominantly Catholic.
To bring the province to heel, King James I installed landlords loyal to the British crown.
He ordered them to settle their vast new estates in Ulster with thousands of protestants from Scotland and England.
Within a generation, the resentment of the native Catholic Irish had exploded into violence religious and ethnic tension which has continued in one form or another for 400 years.
The symbols of the Ulster Scots Protestant heritage are still proudly displayed today.
It was descendants of the Protestant settlers who recognised that a small town at the mouth of the River Lagan had the potential to be a major port.
By the early 1800s, Belfast was the beating heart of the region's commerce and industry.
Belfast's early prosperity was based on linen and cotton, but by the end of the nineteenth century, the city had emerged as one of the world's great ship-building centres.
Belfast's most famous construction was a great liner that sailed only once.
The Titanic.
Like many of us, historian, Neil Oliver, has been gripped by its story.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the Titanic.
I even sent away for this copy of the Daily Mirror, from the day in 1912 when she struck the iceberg.
It reports that RMS Titanic was in "no immediate danger" but there was concern at Harland and Wolff - the Belfast shipyard that built her.
I've to come to meet David Livingstone, who spent all his working life with Harland and Wolff.
David has designed some of the biggest oil tankers in the world.
He's also the only Belfast man to have dived to the wreck of the Titanic, two and a half miles down on the Atlantic seabed.
David.
Good morning, Neil.
Welcome to Belfast.
Thanks very much.
Where are we? We're on number three slipway, which is where Titanic was built.
We're standing at the head of the slipway, and this little sketch gives an indication of what it looked like in 1912.
That black wedge there? That black wedge is this concrete.
It was built up with wood at that time.
If we could go back in time a hundred years, it's the thought that this space would just be filled by that massive ship right above us.
It would just be towering up.
Yes, and hundreds of men.
Horses, carts, all sorts of machinery, lots of clattering noise, riveting.
A very active place.
I just can't take in the nothingness that's here.
You know, it's just so desolate, and yet it's associated with something so famous.
Absolutely.
In the nineteenth century, Belfast came to rival Glasgow as the major ship-building city in the UK.
Companies in Belfast had experience in building steam engines and boilers to drive the city's linen mills - skills which easily transferred to building steel ships, bending huge metal plates and fastening them together with rivets.
With sail giving way to steam, a new industrial giant was born in Belfast - Harland and Wolff.
These buildings are the company's original headquarters from the time of Titanic.
In reports of the sinking, one name stands out - Thomas Andrews - the Belfast engineer who designed her.
Andrews managed Harland and Wolff's impressive ship-building empire.
This is a fantastic room.
Isn't it a beautiful room? I don't know what I expected this to be like, but it's such a fantastic big room, it seems to demand fantastic big ships.
Yes, it's really a majestic building.
It looks almost cathedral-like.
Andrews joined Harland and Wolff at the age of 16.
He worked in all the departments of the shipyard.
He came to know the ship-building industry inside out, eventually became Chief Naval Architect, and eventually became Managing Director of the shipyard.
In the decade before the Great War, the White Star Line and Cunard were competing to dominate the Atlantic passenger trade.
The rivals were ordering ever bigger and faster liners.
In 1906, Cunard launched the Luisitania from John Brown shipyard on the Clyde, Titanic was the White Star Line's response.
You get a very good view of the Olympic and Titanic slipway.
Is that them there? That's number two and number three slip.
Titanic was 900 feet long - the length of three football pitches.
She stood 175 feet above the slipway, the tallest structure in Belfast.
You could see her from all over the city.
Launched in May 1911, RMS Titanic was the biggest man-made object ever to move across the face of the earth.
She left Belfast in April 1912.
On board was Thomas Andrews.
On the night of April 14th - when Titanic hit an iceberg - Andrews, her designer, was the first to realise that his "unsinkable" masterpiece was doomed.
He wasted no time, insisting that the incredulous crew order "abandon ship".
Many who survived probably owed their lives to his selfless professionalism.
News of his heroism was telegraphed around the world.
After accident, Andrews advised passengers to put on heavy clothing and prepare to leave vessel.
He assisted women and children to lifeboats.
When last seen, officers say he was throwing overboard deckchairs to people in the water.
His chief concern - safety for everyone but himself.
Along with another 1,512 victims, Thomas Andrews drowned that night.
When I first read the story of the Titanic when I was a wee boy, I got to the bit where she sinks two and a half miles to the foot of the Atlantic, and I thought that was the end of the story.
And when I came here, I think I expected to find this place frozen in that moment, but of course not.
Time moved on, and virtually every trace of the building of the Titanic has long since been tidied away.
But when you look around, there's obviously still big things going on here.
And I mean really big! The age of the great ocean liner is over for Belfast, but there are new behemoths of the ocean to be built, rigged out, and repaired.
Structures that would rival Titanic.
Oil rigs.
How many Titanics would you get in there? Certainly two side-by-side, maybe even four.
I take it you don't actually build.
You're not building the rigs or the ships? No, we're not building ships today.
It's not economically viable to build ships.
At some time in the future if the economic climate is right, then we may build ships here again.
We have all the facilities to do so.
And it's all in place and at the right press of a button? Yes, we can build a ship.
You'll be building huge ships again? Yes.
Having spent a bit of time here, I've realised that Titanic is part of a much bigger story.
Titanic was made possible by Belfast's determination to exploit its connection to the sea, and by the imagination of men like Thomas Andrews.
Carrickfergus was the administrative capital of Ulster.
In 1690, Protestant King William of Orange - King Billy to the locals - landed here, in the little harbour protected by its Norman castle.
He had come to Ireland in pursuit of deposed Catholic King James II.
MARCHING MUSIC PLAYED ON PIPES William's victory over James at the Battle of the Boyne is still celebrated every year by the Orange Order.
In spite of long-standing tensions, the coast here has seen great periods of stability and growth.
Just seven miles beyond Carrickfergus is Whitehead, until the 1880's an isolated village with nothing to recommend it but great sea views.
Then along came the railway, providing easy access to the centre of Belfast.
19th century yuppies descended on the place in droves and gentrified it.
Whitehead soon offered the refined pleasures of a typical Victorian resort.
But what I'm more interested in lies one mile north of the town.
A truly remarkable seaside walk.
It was the Victorians who first spotted how much money could be made from coastal tourism.
Getting the punters to the seaside was half the battle, the other half was giving them something to do when they got there.
After the Victorian entrepreneurs brought the railway to Whitehead, they built the most unusual coastal walkway found anywhere on our journey around the UK.
There's not much of the path left now.
Alice Roberts is in search of what does remain.
At first sight, this little cove looks entirely natural, but on closer inspection there are steps hewn into the rocks over there, and there's lettering on the cliffs behind.
They're the first signs of the path I'm looking for.
But confronted by cliffs like these, you'd never think that someone would consider building a walkway beyond here.
One man wasn't going to let this natural buttress get in his way.
This is Wise's Eye, named after Deane Berkeley Wise, the railway magnate who brought Victorian tourists by train to nearby Whitehead.
In 1902, Mr Wise opened the Gobbins cliff path.
Like the great piers on the coast of England, the Gobbins cliff path was built so that tourists could literally walk over water.
A heart-stopping, mind-blowing traverse round more than two miles of sheer cliff face.
All of it just a few feet above the waves of the Irish Sea.
Unfortunately, today this short section is the only part of the Gobbins path easily reached from the shore.
Lucky for me, it's a different story by boat.
It's absolutely beautiful.
It's lovely.
Over here is what's called the man of war, or the stack.
As you can see from this old photograph here, there was a tubular bridge that ran across from the mainland onto the stack, and then another concrete bridge from the stack back to the mainland again.
That's the concrete bridge there, isn't it? Yes.
How did they get these structures here, because the cliffs are pretty sheer, aren't they? They cut the steps into the rock itself, and the bridges were built in Belfast - in the shipyard - and they put them onto barges and floated them around and hoisted them onto the cliffs.
There's over two milesReally? .
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of pathway all the way round here.
It is an extraordinary feat of Victorian engineering, this idea that you'll have a promenade.
Even though it's difficult to get to, you're going to have a promenade that can go all way along this coast.
Around every corner, there is always something else and something is going to take your interest.
The railway company advertised the Gobbins as "a walk with ravines, caves and natural aquariums "that has no parallel in Europe.
" The Gobbins was an immediate hit with the tourists, and it's easy to see why because the scenery is spectacular.
This is captured in the postcards of the time, so we can see here the steps and the railings that are rusting here today, the wonderful tunnel bridge that looks like something space-age crossing over one of the chasms.
This is a suspension bridge further along, and it's got a bit of writing on the back.
"Having a lovely time down here, glorious weather, "was at this place today and climbed over this bridge and through the caves.
" This one again of that fantastic tunnel bridge.
I like this one, they obviously got a bit sunburnt.
"Having a good time, B and I are like beetroots".
It's quite strange reading these, because today there's no tourists at all.
Peter, why is the cliff path in such a dilapidated state today? It was closed during the war because they didn't have the staff to maintain it.
After the war then, it lay for some time not being used.
It was reopened again in 1951, but after that it fell into disrepair, and it was closed again in 1961.
The Victorians were right about the lure of the coast.
100 years on, we'll still part with our hard-earned cash to enjoy it.
If only someone had the guts to restore this path, I'd be the first in the queue.
It's Larne, not Belfast, that's Northern Ireland's busiest ferry port.
Larne has the shortest sea crossing to Scotland.
That intimate Scottish link ensures this stretch of coast is mostly Protestant and fiercely Loyalist.
Once again, we're never far from reminders of Ireland's troubled history.
Every route has a story to tell.
For the next 30 miles, I'll be following what many people claim is one of Europe's most scenic coastal highways.
The Antrim Coast Road.
Built in the 1830s, no other road in the UK hugs the coast like this, winding round rocky headlands for 23 glorious miles.
It's a journey that also cuts through some of the blackest moments in Irish history.
In fact, it takes us back to the birth of the United Kingdom itself.
The Antrim Coast Road leaves strongly-Protestant Larne, and winds round the seashore to the almost exclusively-Catholic community at Cushendun.
It's a journey through Northern Ireland's sharpest divide.
170 years ago, this journey would have been impossible.
Before the road arrived, coastal villages were only linked by often-impassable tracks.
Local landlords were determined to open up this coast, whatever the cost.
It's a fantastic view from up here, and you can see exactly how this coast road was created.
The cliff was blasted away, the rubble and debris was built up to create a 21-foot-wide platform and that was the base for the road.
That's exactly what these drawings demonstrate.
These are the drawings made by William Bald - the engineer for the government in London who were paying for the project.
In the 1830s, this was the biggest construction site in Ireland.
I've cycled 12 miles now, and already, I can see how this massive engineering project has transformed the coastline.
The origin of this great road lies in a traumatic upheaval, 32 years before building began.
Events that culminated in one of the most seismic moments of Irish history.
Like much of Europe in the 1780s, rebellion was stirring in Ireland.
Trouble was nothing new, but surprisingly in these coastal villages, dissenting Protestants and Catholics were fighting on the same side.
Scottish settlers and their Catholic neighbours were in revolt against the power of their landlords.
The 1798 rebellion was quickly crushed, but the alliance of United Irishmen sent shockwaves through the British establishment.
On January 1st 1801 - less than three years after the rebellion - London abolished the Irish Parliament in Dublin.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was born, and ruled from Westminster.
As the Act of Union brought relative peace, planning for the coast road began.
Road building can bring big economic benefits to people who live along it.
Here, that meant the Protestant landowners.
Those landlords petitioned the new UK government to construct this coastal highway.
Access made their land more valuable and they could charge their mainly-Catholic tenants higher rents.
But in 1845, the completion of the road was overshadowed by a catastrophe that would bring appalling loss of life right across Ireland.
This memorial is standing right at the end of the point, and it says up there that "this memorial is imperishable," but it's certainly perished.
Someone has been along here and chipped off lines of script.
And up there, it looks as if there has been a plaque that was prised away here.
The limestone monument commemorates the great potato famine of the 1840s.
For three years blight destroyed the potato crop, and Ireland was left to starve.
The memorial was erected by Lady Londonderry, Winston Churchill's great-grandmother.
She built this opulent summer residence in 1848, the worst year of the great famine.
Today it's a Roman Catholic college.
It holds a vital clue to the vandalism of the famine memorial on the coast road below.
This is a replica of the inscription.
This wasn't attached to the side of the memorial, was it? Yes, you noticed.
It's been wrenched off those brackets.
It was removed, it disappeared for some time.
Not by yourself, I take it? Definitely not, but it has come into my safekeeping.
Which are the lines that were cut off? That would be interesting.
It must be this one here.
Yes, you can see.
"England's generosity".
So someone objected to "England's generosity".
Then down here we've got, these lines were chipped off, "Britannia gave her bounty with her tears, "and bear this record "though in phrases crude of England's love "and Ireland's gratitude.
" Well, that's certainly a different version of Irish history.
It is pretty controversial.
It is.
Ireland was devastated by the potato famine.
No wonder it stuck in local throats.
One and a half million people died of starvation and disease, while nearly two million emigrated.
And no help came from London, the economic dogma of the day insisted it wasn't the Government's job to bale out starving tenants, so English granaries remained resolutely closed, and English ships stayed in their harbours.
Lady Londonderry did help her tenants, but the damage was done.
Expecting dying people to show gratitude proved deeply offensive.
Does any of the resentment that caused the memorial to be damaged live through till today? Memories are long, and still people will think about the famine in ways which In other societies, those memories have long since disappeared.
So, if we took this plaque down to the memorial stone and put it back up again, nobody would take it away again? I wouldn't put very much money on that.
Until the road was pushed round Garron Point, this was the most isolated part of the Antrim Coast.
Local people still call it the "inner glens".
The inner glens have retained a strong sense of their innate Catholic and Gaelic roots.
A heritage that is still expressed in sport.
This is hurling, the oldest recorded sport in Europe.
It's similar to bandy in Wales and shinty in Scotland.
For me, the road has been a way into this part of County Antrim.
For locals, it's often been a way out.
Back in the 19th century, people emigrated to escape poverty.
In the 1970s and '80s, many were driven away by the Troubles.
The Antrim Coast Road is stunning, yet it's striking how few tourists you come across.
If this was, say, the west country of England, I might well be stuck in a traffic jam, looking across at a marina, waiting to enter a theme park - Antrimworld! But here, what do you get? Empty roads and peaceful beaches.
It might seem odd - tasteless, even - to talk of the benefits the Troubles might have brought to the Northern Irish coast, but this is one of them.
A rare, uncluttered stillness.
At Torr Head, on the northeast corner of Ireland, there's barely a whisker between these cliffs and Scotland.
The two countries are just 12 miles apart.
Nature makes this narrow channel a troublesome stretch of water.
The Atlantic Ocean collides with the Irish Sea.
Churning currents surge round unforgiving rocks.
With over 500 shipwrecks recorded here, no wonder this coast is guarded by four lighthouses.
The height of any light is carefully worked out to make the most of its location.
Too low, and the beam won't be seen from a distance.
Too high, and it'll be obscured by mist and cloud in bad weather.
Of all the lighthouses I've seen, one of my favourites guards this coast at Rathlin Island.
Yes, it is upside down, and it's unique in the UK.
John McFaul is its part-time custodian.
The reason the light is at the base level is to get the desired height for the light above sea level, where it's most effective.
We have a light on the south point of the island and one on the northeast.
This is quite a blind spot, this part of the coast, there is no light on it, you see? A ship would come in from the west, get past this bad part and pick up the other lights.
For it to be a full red light is quite unusual.
There wouldn't be many full red lights.
It is basically just a warning light.
Here is the lens, it revolves continuously.
Those prisms, they focus the light through the centre, to give it a strong beam off to sea.
It holds a steel trough, filled with mercury.
That revolving lens there is actually bearing on that.
It just floats round on it.
The North Antrim coast is one of the most vicious I've seen anywhere in the UK.
These reefs of volcanic rock jut out into the sea like barbs waiting to snag the hulls of unwary ships, and over the centuries, they've claimed thousands of lives.
One of the most famous wrecks was a Spanish galleon that foundered here in the autumn of 1588.
It was the year of the Spanish Armada.
Marine archaeologist, Mark Horton, has been on the trail of the Armada for much of his working life.
In late July, 1588, 122 Spanish ships were sighted in the English Channel.
For nearly a week, the English chased and harried the Armada.
Then, on 6th August, they attacked with fire ships.
The Spanish galleons scattered in panic, and a huge sea battle raged off the Belgian coast.
With the English attacking them from the rear and the wind driving them north, the Spanish fleet had only one option - to sail home by the rugged coastlines of Scotland and Ireland.
Prevailing winds and the pursuing English forced the Armada to take the long route back to Spain, around the top of Scotland.
If that wasn't bad enough, the Spanish were battered by unusually ferocious storms AND they had no accurate charts for their new course home.
The hostile coasts of Scotland and Ireland claimed over 30 of the Armada's ships.
Three months after the battle, one of the last stragglers reached the Antrim coast.
On a wild October night in 1588, the Girona - overloaded with survivors from two other ships - was smashed to pieces on the coast just along here.
Starving, sick and terrified, the 1,300 men crammed aboard the Girona were blown onto the rocks.
This reef cut open the hull like a knife through butter.
Almost immediately, the locals called this place Port na Spaniagh, or Bay of the Spaniards.
Hi, Wes.
I've come to meet Wes Forsythe from the University of Ulster.
He shares my passion for discovering the ultimate fate of the Armada.
I know Wes well, but I've never visited this wreck site before.
So, the poor survivors were just smashed onto that rock? Absolutely.
We don't know how many there were.
There were a handful, but some of them managed to get ashore, managed to cling on there all night, and then, in the light of day, managed to make their way to the top of the cliffs.
Hundreds of feet! They had to climb up or make their way around the shore and climb above.
Out of what, 1,300 on the ship? 1,300 men.
That handful of survivors made it to nearby Dunluce Castle, stronghold of the local Irish chieftain.
As well as helping the Spaniards, the chieftain helped himself to the salvage from the wreck.
Within six months, he was remodelling his castle in the Elizabethan style - paid for by the booty he'd grabbed.
The story and location of the Girona slipped into history, and were forgotten for 400 years.
Then, in 1967, an international team of divers located the site of the wreck here around Port na Spaniagh.
They spent the next two summers excavating the site.
Archaeologists don't like to talk about treasure ships, but this is one that does fit in with that picture, because the survivors of the ship were the nobility of Spain, and they were the most important people who were trying to get back to safety.
And so, what was found in terms of their belongings is very rich indeed.
There was a lot of gold and silver coins, a lot of personal jewellery and ornaments.
There were brooches, there were buckles, they really were very decked out.
I think they had an idea that when they got to London, they wanted to be very impressive as they walked through the streets.
It sounds like, from the finds in this bay, that they were officered by chaps who were more concerned about finery than they were about military strategy.
Finery was all part of it.
They had to display their finery, this is how they showed There were no naval uniforms as such, and they had to show their finery and rank by displaying their goods in this way.
But those same goods also tell us a great deal about - not just Spanish society - but the Spanish empire, and one of the nicest finds is a little gold salamander encrusted with rubies in its back.
The salamander itself is a mythical creature from South America, and the gold used for it is from South America.
The rubies came from Burma, they were made in Spain and it ended up in north Antrim, so it says a great deal about the extent of Spain's power and trading empire at that time.
But ultimately, they were no match to the English sea dogs.
Ultimately they were no match, but here they weren't defeated by the English, here they were defeated by the Irish weather.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the Spanish Armada had succeeded.
Britain and Ireland would have become part of the Spanish Empire, and a united Catholic nation.
And maybe, 400 years of conflict here in Ireland might have been avoided.
Locals call this the walking coast.
There are 14 miles of uninterrupted cliff paths revealing spectacular views.
All along this awesome coast, you're walking through legend.
As well as tales of Spanish gold, there are much older stories based in the landscape itself.
One myth draws on the weird geology that defines these majestic cliffs.
The most famous legend tells of two battling giants and a walkway across the sea.
The Giant's Causeway.
The Causeway has been attracting visitors for over 300 years.
From the very beginning, there was a debate over whether it was built with picks and shovels, or by nature.
But canny locals realised geology didn't sell.
They needed a marketing ploy.
By attaching a myth - a bold, gigantic myth - to these bizarre rocks, they've become Northern Ireland's number one tourist attraction.
Alice is exploring the Causeway's origins, mythological and geological.
This is a fantastic structure, it's got a real man-made quality to it.
It's like some massive art installation.
So, the Causeway's legend goes like this.
In the green corner was one Finn McCool, a local Irish giant, and in the blue corner, Benandonner, his Scottish rival.
A challenge was issued, but Benandonner refused to swim from Scotland for the fight.
So, Finn the Irish giant, built him the Causeway.
To save face, Benandonner accepted Finn's challenge, but he lost the fight.
Scared that Finn would follow him home to Scotland, Benandonner tore up most of the Causeway as he fled.
Yes.
It's very plausible(!) When you first approach the causeway, it just looks like rocky coastline, but when you get up here and look down on it, it does start to look like a Causeway.
It looks like this road stretching off into the sea and you can imagine the Scottish giant ripping it up as he ran.
That's why it disappears into the sea just there.
It really does look like a pavement - these massive paving slabs.
In 1986, The Giant's Causeway was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations.
It was granted this status partly because the struggle to understand how this strange landscape was formed helped to give birth to the science of geology.
The myth is that the Causeway was made by a giant, but the reality is no less amazing than that, because we go back in the mists of time some 60 million years ago, to when all of this land was ravaged by volcanic activity.
Cracks appeared in the ground and lava spewed up, filling up the river valleys with great pools of this drying lava, this cooling lava.
It cooled evenly and slowly, cracking on its surface like dry mud, and the cracks ran down through it as well, producing the columns that we see today.
It wasn't the end of the story of this landscape, because then successive ice ages came, buried it under ice, but when the last ice sheet receded some 10,000 years ago, the Giant's Causeway was revealed.
These incredible rocks have never lost their appeal, even in Northern Ireland's most violent times.
It's Peter Harper's job to promote and protect the area.
For me, the Causeway is much bigger than anything the Troubles has to offer.
The Causeway is a World Heritage Site so it always had that draw.
Now there's a danger peace could bring chaos to the Causeway.
In 1995, after the IRA ceasefire, the number of visitors nearly tripled.
It's predicted they'll soon reach one million a year.
Local developers will pay for a new visitors' centre, if they can add hotels, holiday villages and golf courses.
Groups campaigning to protect the area are horrified, and have threatened to take legal action.
Development and conservation are the two giants battling at the Causeway now.
Peter, how do local people feel about this dilemma? Well, local people live here, they've got make a living, it is a living landscape.
I suppose a lot of them would like to see more economic benefit from the Causeway, but equally, a lot of people recognise it is such a special place.
Quite naturally if you're in the tourism industry, you'd want to be close to the major attraction in Northern Ireland but I think the setting of the site is very important.
I don't think it It would be ridiculous to want development up to the cliff edge.
The heated debate over the future of the site has caught the attention of the United Nations.
They have the power to remove the Causeway's World Heritage status, a threat that's focusing minds on a solution.
An international competition is now underway to design the much-needed new visitors' centre.
One thing is certain - no coast stays the same forever, and we can't turn our shoreline into a museum.
It's the ever-shifting nature of the landscape and its moods that draws us here, and that, at least, shows no signs of changing.
The shifting scenery of the Atlantic coast is sudden and dramatic.
The cliffs of the Giant's Causeway give way to long sandy beaches, "strands" as the locals call them.
Portrush is the Blackpool of Northern Ireland.
Built on a promontory, it's flanked by two glorious strands, but even these idyllic beaches have seen their share of bloody conflict.
In 1103, Magnus Barefoot - the Viking King of Norway - was killed here during a battle with local Irish clans.
Tucked behind the dunes is Royal Portrush golf course.
In the '50s, it hosted the British Open - the only time it's been played outside Britain.
But the Troubles flared up, and it hasn't been back since.
But some people aren't put off by trouble.
One sport has continued to take full advantage of Portrush's coastal terrain, regardless of the danger.
ENGINE REVS SIRENS BLARE This is the North West 200.
For one celebrated Saturday every year, the world's elite race on the coast road.
As we approach Lough Foyle, we are nearing the end of our journey.
Stretching into the distance is Magilligan Foreland - 12 square miles of magnificent sand dunes.
They've been here since the last ice age and are still growing today.
Even this seemingly-tranquil setting has rarely been free of violence.
This strategic spit of sand at the mouth of Lough Foyle has been a military site for centuries.
It's got its own Martello tower, almost identical to the ones I saw in Folkestone.
It was built to keep the French at bay during the Napoleonic wars.
In 1812, there was a real fear of a French-Irish alliance, using Ireland to stage a back-door invasion of Britain.
ALARM SOUNDS There's a more recent reminder here to the troubled relationship between Ireland and Britain.
This is the grim perimeter of Magilligan Prison, once home to many of Northern Ireland's paramilitary prisoners.
Magilligan has been reabsorbed into the mainstream prison system, just another jail for low-risk inmates.
I started my journey at one end of the border between the north and south of Ireland, and finished at the other.
Just across the water lies the Republic.
The new cross-border ferry service started in 2002 - a real vote of confidence that peace is here to stay.
People say the ferry's mostly used by northerners nipping over to the Republic to fill up their tanks - petrol's cheaper there.
My enduring impression of the Northern Irish coast is actually one of peace.
Despite its troubled history, today, this is one of the most untroubled places in the whole of the UK.
Tourism and prosperity will bring new challenges, but then again, the people round here are no strangers to a challenge.
The next leg of our journey takes us across a different stretch of water to the west coast of Scotland.
We're heading to a paradise of islands, whirlpools, and minke whales.
Once home to mighty warrior clans, now this jagged coast is the perfect hiding place for the UK's nuclear arsenal.
And you'll still find that rare event, a ship launch.
11,000 tonnes of steel sliding down a slipway.
Launch! Oh yes, and there's a rocket.

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