Last night we decided that we needed something to do after leaving Belfast and before we went to our next accommodations in Derry. Isabelle’s meticulous planning provided us with several options, and we chose the Gobbins.

The Gobbins stretches from Whitehead to Portmuck Harbour along the eastern coast of Islandmagee, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, on the Causeway Coastal Route. It’s comprised of several bridges, catwalks, a pass-thru cave, and so many freakin’ stairs, and it’s all built along the cliff face of the Atlantic Ocean. The route is about 1 mile long, with a 1/2 mile trek down a very steep incline from the road to the entrance to the trail. All told, it’s a 3 mile round-trip trek.

We had a very good morning for this excursion; it would have been absolute hell if it were raining even a little bit because the trail alternated between natural rock (smoothed by over 100 years of human feet), concrete, and glass-reinforced plastic which formed the basis for the human-made walkways.

The Gobbins was the brainchild of Berkley Dean Wise when he was the Chief Engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway Company in 1902, but died before he could see his complete plans implemented. Wise’s strategy was to create a tourist destination that would utilize the railway on weekends when it was normally dormant. While no visitor has ever died on the trail, there have been a few natural disasters, such as a landslide which closed the trail for many years.

We were on a tour with six other folks, all from other countries, and our trail leader was Glynn (“Glen”). He said that he walks the trail twice per day, and understandably, that’s more than enough. The trail was tough in part because of the constant up and down, but it was the walk back up to the road that was the real killer. The entire trip is the equivalent of walking 50 flights of stairs.

One interesting fact about the trail is that we pass along a section of the cliff which is home to several different types of sea birds. While puffins are known to frequent the area, we didn’t see any today.

As an added bonus, the day was so clear that we could actually see the coast of Scotland.