Things to do in County Londonderry

Bellaghy Bawn is situated about 2 miles off the Belfast to Londonderry road near the town of Bellaghy, north west of Lough Neagh. The bold white building, located in Castle Street, it is known locally as "the castle'. Bellaghy Bawn is a 17th century fortified tower house with a surrounding defensive wall (known as a bawn). The Bawn is one of the best preserved in Northern Ireland. Parts of the bawn wall are still standing, although the northern bawn wall with the entrance has gone. The excavated foundations of an earlier 17th-century house can be seen against the western bawn wall. There used to be two round towers at opposite corners of the bawn. Only the south-east tower survives and is attached to the house. On the western wall is a gateway through the wall, and on the outside you can see brick buttresses that have been built to prop up the leaning wall. Facilities The house contains displays featuring the work of local poet, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and other Ulster poets. It also has exhibits featuring local natural history, and a history of the Ulster Plantation. There are video displays of the bawn and some of Seamus Heaney's broadcasts. The castle is open Wednesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm between Easter and the end of September. Reduced opening hours apply for the rest of the year with the house open on Wednesdays from 10am to 4pm and Sundays from noon to 4pm. The Castle was built by Sir Baptist Jones in 1619 on land rented from the Vintners Company of London. On the site is a blend of building styles from 17th century to 19th century. It is believed that the main house was built in the 18th century on the site of the original 17th century house. The Bawn was attacked in the rebellion of 1641 rebellion, but survived unscathed when many in the area were burned down. The house was occupied until 1987. Bellaghy Bawn has been open to the public since 1996.

Benone Beach, sometimes referred to as Magilligan Strand, stretches for over seven miles along the north Londonderry coast between the mouth of the River Bann at Castlerock and the Magilligan Point at the narrow entrance to Lough Foyle, forming one of the longest and widest stretches of continuous beach in Ireland. The beach faces north into the Atlantic approaches and is backed by an extensive dune system that provides habitat of considerable ecological value and a landscape buffer between the beach and the agricultural land and small settlements behind. The beach's scale gives it a quality of solitude unusual on the northern Irish coast even at busy times of year. At low water the strand can extend to considerable width, the tide retreating to expose a vast flat expanse of pale sand that reflects the sky and makes the beach feel even larger than its already impressive dimensions suggest. The water quality at Benone consistently achieves Blue Flag standard, a reflection of the relatively undeveloped nature of the catchment and the lack of significant industrial or urban pollution inputs to this section of the north coast. The Binevenagh escarpment rises steeply above the southern edge of the dune system, its basalt cliffs and moorland plateau providing a dramatic backdrop to the coastal plain and offering walking with panoramic views over the Foyle and toward the hills of Donegal across the lough. The escarpment's exposed south-facing slopes are an important location for peregrine falcons, one of the strongholds of the species in Northern Ireland. Magilligan Point at the western end of the beach commands the narrow entrance to Lough Foyle and is the site of a Martello tower and military installations reflecting the strategic importance of this bottleneck between the Atlantic and the inner lough. The ferry between Magilligan and Greencastle in County Donegal provides a short crossing to the Republic.

Binevenagh is a dramatic basalt escarpment in County Londonderry rising abruptly from the coastal plain north of Limavady to form one of the most impressive natural viewpoints in Northern Ireland, a plateau of open moorland with a sheer northern face that looks out over Lough Foyle and the Atlantic coast toward the hills of Donegal on the far shore. The area forms part of the Binevenagh Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and is managed as a country park, with waymarked walking routes along the escarpment providing access to some of the finest panoramic views available anywhere in the north of Ireland. The geology of Binevenagh reflects the great basalt flood volcanic episode that shaped much of the landscape of northeast Ireland approximately sixty million years ago. The thick basalt lava flows, which gave rise to the Giant's Causeway and the columnar basalt formations along much of the Antrim coast, are here exposed as a near-vertical cliff of considerable height, the horizontal jointing of the basalt producing a stepped profile on the face of the escarpment that is characteristic of this geological formation across the region. The moorland plateau above the escarpment is one of the better surviving examples of acid grassland and heath habitat in Londonderry, supporting the characteristic upland birds of Irish moorland including curlew, golden plover, merlin and peregrine falcon. The peregrine falcon population breeding on the Binevenagh cliffs is one of the most significant in Northern Ireland and has been monitored by conservation organisations for many years. The views from the escarpment are exceptional in both directions. To the north, Benone Beach and the full extent of Lough Foyle are visible, with the Inishowen Peninsula of Donegal closing the northern horizon. To the south, the agricultural landscape of the Roe valley and the more distant Sperrin Mountains provide a contrasting inland panorama.

Dungiven Castle in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is a nineteenth-century Gothic house incorporating the ruins of an Augustinian priory founded in the twelfth century by the O'Cahan family, who are commemorated by one of the finest medieval tomb monuments in Ireland within the priory ruins. The site has a long ecclesiastical history as the location of Dungiven Priory, founded in the twelfth century by the O'Cahan family who were lords of this part of Derry. The early seventeenth-century bastion fortification added to the priory site reflects the plantation era's military requirements. The priory ruin with its decorated O'Cahan tomb is the most significant heritage element of the site and can be visited freely. The surrounding Sperrins landscape provides outstanding walking and cycling country in one of the most scenic upland areas of Northern Ireland.

Mussenden Temple is one of the most dramatic and photographed buildings in Ireland, a small circular classical temple perched right at the very edge of a 120-foot cliff along the north coast of Northern Ireland near Castlerock in County Londonderry. Nothing quite prepares you for the first sight of it: an elegant domed rotunda of precise classical proportions balanced improbably at the cliff edge above the Atlantic, its soft honey stone contrasting with the dark ocean below and the vast expanse of Downhill Strand sweeping to the east. The temple was built in 1785 by Frederick Augustus Hervey, the Bishop of Derry and fourth Earl of Bristol, a figure of considerable personal eccentricity and cultural sophistication who had travelled extensively in Italy and developed a passionate appreciation for classical architecture. Hervey commissioned the temple as a summer library, intended to house his substantial book collection in a building where he and his guests could read with the Atlantic as a backdrop. The design, executed by the Cork architect Michael Shanahan, was modelled on the Temple of Vesta in Rome, and the circular colonnade and domed roof are inspired interpretations of the classical original in local Downhill stone. The temple was named in honour of Hervey's cousin, Frideswide Mussenden, a young woman of whom the bishop was reportedly extraordinarily fond. She died before the temple was completed, and what began as a library gift became a memorial. The Latin inscription carved around the base of the frieze, taken from Lucretius, expresses the pleasure of watching storms from a safe vantage point, an apt choice for a building on a crumbling Atlantic cliff. The Downhill Demesne that surrounds the temple contains the substantial ruins of Downhill House, Hervey's palatial main residence, which was gutted by fire in 1851 and further stripped after the Second World War when it was used to billet Royal Air Force personnel. The contrast between the intact perfection of the small temple and the romantic ruin of the great house creates a landscape of considerable atmospheric power. The National Trust manages the property and has carried out cliff stabilisation work to protect the temple, which coastal erosion has brought ever closer to the cliff edge. The surrounding demesne grounds are freely accessible throughout the year from dawn to dusk, with car park charges applying. The clifftop walk around the estate is superb, with views west across Downhill Beach toward Magilligan Point and Donegal, and east toward the headlands of the Causeway Coast. The Bishop's Gate Garden and Walled Garden add botanical interest to a visit of considerable historical and scenic richness.

Mussenden Temple perches on a clifftop at Downhill on the north coast of County Londonderry, a small circular domed building modelled on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli that stands so close to the cliff edge it appears to be hovering above the Atlantic Ocean below. Built in 1785 by Frederick Hervey, the eccentric Earl of Castledagh and Bishop of Derry, as a library and summer retreat on his Downhill Estate, the temple combines classical architectural refinement with one of the most dramatically exposed positions of any Georgian building in Ireland, the views along the north coast toward the Giant's Causeway to the east and Magilligan Strand to the west forming one of the finest coastal panoramas in Ulster. The Bishop of Derry was one of the most colourful and unconventional figures of eighteenth-century Irish society, a man whose extensive continental travels, enormous wealth and progressive views on religious tolerance made him a distinctive patron of arts and architecture. The Downhill Estate he created above the north coast cliffs was his principal residence, and the lost Downhill House, now a ruin behind the temple, was the main building of an estate that also included the walled garden, a mausoleum and the cliff-edge library building whose survival has made it the emblem of the entire estate. The National Trust acquired Mussenden Temple and the Downhill Estate in 1980 and manages both the building and the surrounding landscape. The clifftop walking route connects the temple to the ruins of Downhill House and the Mussenden Road gives access from the Bishop's Gate, a fine piece of neoclassical gate architecture in its own right. The view from the temple's position on the cliff edge is one of the finest in Northern Ireland, the great curve of Magilligan Strand below, the Inishowen Peninsula across Lough Foyle in Donegal and the distinctive silhouette of Binevenagh Mountain to the southeast creating a panorama of extraordinary variety. The beach at Benone immediately below the estate, one of the longest stretches of beach in Northern Ireland, is accessible from the estate and provides a complementary strand and dune experience to the clifftop drama above.

Salterstown Castle near Ballyronan in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is a ruined early seventeenth-century plantation castle on the shores of Lough Neagh, one of the lesser-known plantation sites associated with the Salters Company of London, one of the twelve London Companies that took part in the Plantation of Ulster and from which the nearby settlement of Salterstown takes its name. The castle represents the plantation settlements established by the London Companies along the western shores of Lough Neagh as part of the systematic colonisation of County Londonderry. Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in Ireland and Britain, is visible from the castle site and provides one of the most important wildlife habitats in Northern Ireland, supporting large populations of eels, wintering wildfowl and breeding waterbirds.