Northern Ireland's scenery is too awe-inspiring to be contained by any single myth or deity - there’s space and time for them all - especially when travelling by bike

Paying homage to a travel writing pioneer, David Bradford rides the coastline of Northern Ireland in the wheel tracks of ghosts, giants and shape-shifting gods

Images of David Bradford riding the Irish coast
(Image credit: Anton Thompson-McCormick)

Having grown up in southernmost England in the Eighties and Nineties, my awareness of Northern Ireland started and ended with grim news reports about bombs and bloodshed. About the actual place, its history, culture and geography, I knew almost nothing. Plenty of friends and relatives went on holiday to Scotland or Wales, but no one crossed the Irish Sea. This unconscious blockade remained in place until my early-30s when I met my partner, Anton, whose roots lay in rural North Antrim. The learning curve was steep, but a key turning point came when, sitting outside a cafe in Derry as the streets filled with besuited marching men thumping bellymounted drums, Anton thrust into my hands a copy of A Place Apart by the late, great travel writer Dervla Murphy.

An account of many weeks spent cycling around Northern Ireland, A Place Apart is a travel book like no other. Most extraordinary is the time of its setting: Murphy cycled to Northern Ireland from her home in the south at the height of the Troubles, summer 1976, and didn’t flinch at sparking up conversations with strangers in some of the diciest locations. These interactions she found addictive, the place beguiling. By the end of her travels, she was urging her friends to visit the north, assuring them that they would “find the people as welcoming [as in the south], the scenery as good, the roads better, and the weather no worse.” To my friends from southern England, I would go further: Northern Ireland beats our region on all these points – except perhaps the weather. And now I’m back here seeking to prove my case.

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