Scenic Point in County Antrim

Bushmills is a small village in County Antrim on the north coast of Northern Ireland, famous throughout the world as the home of the Old Bushmills Distillery, the oldest licensed distillery in the world, whose whiskey has been produced on this site since at least 1608 and whose visitor experience provides one of the most popular and most rewarding distillery tours in Ireland. The village itself is a pleasant Antrim settlement of stone cottages and the River Bush that flows through the village has provided the water for whiskey production for over four centuries. The Old Bushmills Distillery, the centrepiece of the village's identity, produces the triple-distilled Irish whiskey that has made it one of the most recognised whiskey brands internationally, its distinctive smooth character a result of the triple distillation process and the quality of the local water filtered through basalt rock. The distillery tour, one of the most popular in Ireland, takes visitors through the production process from malting through distilling to maturation in the warehouse where the whiskey develops in oak casks over periods from three to twenty-one years. The village's position on the Causeway Coast provides access to the remarkable natural and heritage attractions of this section of the Antrim coast, including the Giant's Causeway three miles to the east, the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge and the dramatic coastal scenery of the Antrim cliffs. The Bushmills to Causeway tramway provides a heritage transport link to the Causeway visitor centre.

Cushendall is the principal village of the Glens of Antrim, a settlement at the confluence of three of the nine Antrim glens whose combination of the colourful painted shopfronts, the remarkable Curfew Tower that serves as the principal visual landmark of the village and the access it provides to the surrounding glens and the Antrim coast makes it the most rewarding base for exploring this section of the northeast Irish coast. The village is the centre of the Red Bay area and the nearby Red Bay castle ruins provide the medieval dimension to a village whose character is primarily Georgian and Victorian. The Curfew Tower, an unusual circular red sandstone tower built in 1817 by Francis Turnly as a place of confinement for idlers and rioters, is the most distinctive building in the village and provides a visual focal point quite unlike any other structure on the Antrim coast. Its original function as a lock-up for disturbers of the peace was apparently taken seriously by its builder, who was sufficiently exercised by the idleness of the local population to build a dedicated facility for their correction. The surrounding Glens of Antrim, in particular Glenariff to the south with its series of waterfalls and the Forest Park, Glenaan and Glenballyeamon to the north, provide excellent walking and scenery in a landscape that is among the most beautiful and most traditionally Irish in the northeast. The Irish language has been spoken in the Glens for centuries and the Gaelic culture of this section of Antrim is among the most authentic surviving in Ulster.

Fair Head on the northeast Antrim coast is the most dramatic headland in Northern Ireland, a great cliff of basalt columns approximately 180 metres high above the North Channel whose combination of the scale of the cliffs, the views across the narrow sea to the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland and the quality of the walking on the clifftop and through the remarkable glacial landscape of the plateau behind the cliff makes it one of the finest natural heritage destinations in Ulster. The basalt columns of Fair Head are among the largest in the British Isles, the individual columns reaching up to 120 metres in height in a display of geological structure that equals and in some respects surpasses the better-known Giant's Causeway. The plateau behind the cliff edge contains a remarkable landscape of glacial lakes, peat bog and ancient woodland remnants that have developed in the shelter of the cliff behind in a habitat mosaic of considerable ecological interest. The three glacial lakes of Lough na Cranagh, Lough Doo and Lough Fadden occupy corrie-like depressions on the plateau and the grey lang, an area of glacially transported boulders, demonstrates the scale of the glacial ice that shaped this headland. The views from Fair Head across the North Channel to the Mull of Kintyre, approximately 23 kilometres away, and on clear days to the coast of Islay further north, provide the most direct appreciation of the geographic relationship between northeast Ireland and southwest Scotland, a proximity that underpinned centuries of cultural exchange between the two coastlines.

Glenariff Forest Park in County Antrim is the largest and most spectacular of the Antrim Glens, a deeply incised river valley descending from the Antrim Plateau to the sea at Waterfoot on the Antrim coast, its combination of wooded gorge, waterfalls, river scenery and coastal views making it the most rewarding of the nine glens for which this section of the Antrim coast is celebrated. The forest park covers approximately 1,000 hectares and provides a network of waymarked walking routes of varying difficulty from the gentle riverside waterfall trail to longer forest and glen rim walks with panoramic coastal views. The waterfall trail is the most popular walk in the park, following the Glenariff River through a gorge of considerable drama past a series of waterfalls, including the impressive Ess-na-Crub and Ess-na-Larach falls, in a landscape of mossy rock, ferns, oak, ash and willow that creates an atmosphere of green, dripping intimacy quite unlike the open moorland plateau above. The combination of the rushing water, the enclosed gorge and the quality of the woodland makes this one of the most atmospheric short walks in Northern Ireland. The poet Thackeray, who visited the glen in 1842, described it as Switzerland in miniature, an enthusiastic Victorian comparison that captures the quality of scale and drama relative to the surrounding landscape if not the geological character. The glen has been a tourist destination since the nineteenth century when the combination of the Antrim coast road and the steamer services from Glasgow made the area accessible to visitors from mainland Britain. The forest park facilities include a visitor centre, café and well-maintained paths and picnic areas that make it an excellent family destination in the Antrim Glens Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Torr Head is a dramatic headland on the Antrim coast at the point where the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland narrows to approximately twenty kilometres, the closest point between Ireland and Scotland from which the Scottish mainland, the Mull of Kintyre and even individual buildings of Campbeltown are visible on clear days. The combination of the dramatic headland scenery, the narrow sea crossing and the remote character of this section of the Antrim coast gives Torr Head a distinctive quality. The Torr Head road from Cushendun to Ballycastle is one of the most spectacularly scenic coastal roads in Ireland, a narrow route climbing and descending the series of headlands above the North Channel with continuous views of the sea and the Scottish coast beyond. The road's combination of narrow width, dramatic gradients and extraordinary views makes it a memorable driving experience on a section of coast that rewards those who venture beyond the main tourist routes. The landscape around Torr Head is part of the Antrim Glens Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the combination of the coastal headlands, the glens descending to the sea and the agricultural character of the North Antrim uplands creates a coastal landscape of considerable diversity. The view from Torr Head on a clear day of the Scottish coast is one of the most immediate reminders available of the proximity and common cultural heritage of Ulster and the Scottish Highlands.