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Oh, to be in the North Now that Spring is Here
A visit to the North of Ireland during an admittedly overcast early spring
might not seem like a holiday made in heaven, but the truth is that family
get-togethers fill more seats on flights to Belfast than tourism.As John
Barrett, a late colleague on The Irish Post used to say, an Irish person
returning home for a break is a holiday-maker, not a tourist.
In other words, grandparents are a bigger draw than any guidebook. That
said, once you’re there, the guidebook can enrich your stay and give your
trip home more of the quality of a break abroad.
Every parent of small children knows that the key to a happy holiday
is keeping the kids amused. Wear them out with activities during daylight
hours and there will be no time for tantrums, and the evenings will be free
for the adults to entertain themselves.
Living in London, of course, you have 1001 things you could do with them
but 101 good reasons why it would be far too much hassle.
The beauty of Northern Ireland is that, even in Belfast, there are no
traffic jams, no impossibly crowded pavements, no congestion charging, no
queues, no overburdened facilities. Peace in the political sense might still
be imperfect there but the relative tranquility of existence is remarkable.
Having grown up in the North, I had a good few preconceptions to overcome
when it comes to holidaying there with my kids. In the 70s for instance,
the fun police used to lock up the swings and the swimming pool on a Sunday.
Amenities were also pretty thin on the ground. Amusements for children didn’t
stretch much beyond seaside fairgrounds.
In the last 10 years, however, the North has had the kind of cash injection
that, if it were Botox, would have smoothed out every contour in the Six
Counties.
Everywhere you go there are fresh attractions and new developments to
existing ones. Also, the choice is now yours as to how you observe the Sabbath.
Our first visit was to the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum in Cultra,
a few miles outside Belfast on the Bangor road. It is really two museums
in one. The open-air folk museum is a recreation of life as it was lived
in the North over a century ago.
I went to it as a schoolboy and my abiding memory of it was a demonstration
of how to make wheaten and soda farls on a griddle over an open fire and
thinking, that’s nothing, sure my granny makes bread like that.
We told Isobel, who is four, and Ruairi, who is two, that we were going
to a place that showed how people lived a long time ago.
“Will there be dinosaurs?” she asked. When we got there, the first thing
she saw was what she described as an old-fashioned cat.
The folk museum is divided up into a town area and rural area. The town
has a row of houses that originally stood in Belfast’s Sandy Row in the
1820s. It also has a couple of churches, a rectory, a bank with bank manager’s
house attached, a cobbler’s shop and a national school. My only objection
was that the sweetie shop actually sold old-fashioned sweets but the pub
sold nothing, old-fashioned or otherwise. On this one occasion, a spot of
commercial exploitation would have been appreciated.
The kids had a great time, running up and down the stairs of the houses,
jumping on the bank counter, sitting on the outside toilet, staring at the
coal fires (lit in just about every building) and writing on the slates
in the schoolhouse.
We hardly had time to do more than scratch the surface of the rural area,
though a couple of buildings had a particular resonance for me, originating
as they did in my part of Co. Down — a weaver’s house from Ballydugan and
a bleach green tower from Tullylish, where the night-watchman guarded the
linen bleaching in the fields. I had always thought it was a shepherd’s
hut. There’s also the original Catholic church from Drumcree, in Portadown,
dating from 1783.
The museum is constantly developing with a workshop from Dungannon, a
saw mill from Fermanagh, a cornmill from Straid and a street terrace from
Antrim currently being rebuilt.
The transport museum is mostly under cover, with the exception of a miniature
railway which runs from Easter to September, weather permitting, and a schooner
and a fishing boat. The locomotives in the railway collection are in a giant
hangar which you descend into via a gently sweeping concrete walkway, giving
you an awe-inspiring overview of the trains. You can push the kids around
the collection in a toy train for free and you can climb aboard many of
the exhibits. There are loads of information panels to take in, or you can
simply marvel at the mechanics.
Next come the road transport galleries, with their bicycles and motorbikes
and cars, from the penny farthing to the Raleigh chopper, from the early
Fords to the De Lorean. Again, the exhibits are put in context with a wealth
of information. For example, a model family enjoys a picnic next to a 50s
motor, demonstrating how the affordability of motor transport opened up
the countryside to ordinary families.
Another gallery is devoted to horse-drawn transport, coaches and carriages,
air transport and a Titanic exhibition, but again we didn’t have time to
take it all in.
You could quite happily spend an entire day taking everything in and
we will definitely be back for more.
Having stepped back in time, it felt only right to continue the theme
so we headed for Grace Neill’s in Donaghadee, just a few miles past Bangor,
which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest bar in Ireland,
dating back to 1611. It’s a handsome old building and fair dues to the barman,
who admitted it was the oldest line in the book when he said he couldn’t
do an Irish coffee as there wasn’t any cream in the fridge.
As if by contrast, our next trip was very much back to the future: The
very futuristic W5 in the Odyssey Centre, a striking example of Belfast’s
regeneration, home to the Belfast Giants ice hockey team, the Hard Rock
café and a multi-screen cinema.
The W5 stands for “whowhatwherewhenwhy” and our children just loved it.
It’s an interactive science museum with over 100 exhibits and something
for all ages, including adults. It opened in March 2001 and had over 270,000
visitors in its first year.
The museum is broken down into five sections. “WOW” has exhibits based
on the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, including a 5m column
of twisting fire, the Fire Tornado, and a sort of tyre you press down to
produce an enormous smoke ring.
“Start” is the section my kids loved best. It’s designed for children
aged eight and under to imagine, explore, experiment and communicate in
their own space. You can build a house with foam bricks and tiles, using
a crane. There’s a pool for blowing bubbles and you can make your own water
race. You can keep a ball in the air with a jet of air. You can build your
own roller coaster and watch a ball loop the loop. You can write a message
and send it down a pneumatic tube to your friend by jumping up and down
on an air cushion. There’s even a toy supermarket.
The kids also loved the musical staircase, whose every step emits a different
sound when you walk on it, and A Moment Ago, a screen which shows a delayed
image of you, so that you can wave at the camera and see yourself standing
still then seconds later, waving. It sounds simple but is oddly fascinating.
“Go” focuses on the physical exploration of the world, discovering how
it works — lifting, moving, flying, communications. One exhibit shows you
what a year of cigarettes smoked at the rate of 20 a day looks like. Another
computer programme asks you 20 lifestyle questions and works out your ‘real’
physical age. I came out feeling two years younger! The Bernoulli fountain
lets you try to balance balls as they hover in vertical streams of water.
A crane complete with joystick and electromagnet offers the challenge of
loading a cargo ship, resembling the cranes of the Port of Belfast outside.
“See” highlights the senses with microscopes, lasers and perception experiments.
One fascinating exhibit allows you to divide your face in two and reassemble
it as two left sides and two right sides. Symmetrical beauty, how are you?
There’s also an electronic harp, which you play by triggering sensors with
your hand in the space where the strings should be. You can also try your
hand at deciphering letters in Braille, beat a lie detector and boggle your
mind with optical illusions.
“Do” is a problem-solving space where you can create and design bridges,
practice weaving, build robots and even make your own animated film.
Again, this is a place we can bring the kids back to for years to come,
knowing they will never be bored.
Ego Patricius, which is the St. Patrick Centre in Downpatrick, Co. Down,
is more suited for older children and adults. Set in a strikingly handsome
modern building, the exhibition uses modern audio-visual technology to tell
the story of Ireland’s patron saint. What could have been a dry and dusty
museum is instead a fascinating history lesson, more Simon Schama than school
library.
You begin by passing over a ‘time bridge’ into the fifth century. As
you move through the exhibition halls, you press buttons to activate audio-visual
displays that tell Patrick’s story. You are introduced to the Romano-British
world where Patrick lived, contrasted with the Celtic world of 5th century
Ireland. You hear Patrick’s story in his own words, the Confession and Letter
to Coroticus, the only surviving Irish texts from the fifth century.
The exhibition goes on to relate the story of Patrick’s captivity, his
time as a shepherd, his religious awakening, his escape and his struggle
to be accepted as a missionary, first by the Church authorities, and then
by the Irish people. Later, you listen to contemporary opinions as historians
and clerics speak of Patrick’s legacy.
The next section of the exhibition offers you the chance to explore Saint
Patrick’s influence on Ireland and Europe, from missionary work to manuscripts.
The final part of the exhibition is a cinema journey around St. Patrick’s
Ireland filmed from a helicopter and shown on a huge 180 degree screen.
Once you get over the slightly queasy feeling induced by the rapidly sweeping
camera angles, you get a real sense of the majesty of the landscape, from
Croaghpatrick to Lough Derg.
After learning about Ireland’s foremost fisher of men, we headed for
Exploris, the North of Ireland’s aquarium, located in Portaferry on the
Ards peninsula, a 7-minute ferry ride from Strangford, a lovely little village
to have lunch.
We arrived just in time to catch a touch tank demonstration, where children
are allowed to touch and hold the animals — starfish, scallops galloping
across the floor of the tank like a bellows, lobster, even a ray that seemed
to be trying to climb up the side of the tank.
All marine life is here, from crabs to conger eels, from octopus to sharks
to plug-ugly fish whose names I forget. I never knew there were such ugly
creatures in the world. But hey, who knows whether they’re thinking the
same thing on the other side of the reinforced glass?
The aquarium seeks to explain how marine life differs from deep to shallow
waters, from sandy harbours to the open sea. Like every other centre we
visited, it makes education entertaining. Every teacher should get a free
pass.
Exploris opened in 1994 and in 2000 was extended to include a seal sanctuary.
The centre teaches visitors what to do if they find a seal pup and how the
sanctuary cares for them before releasing them back into the wild.
There are also plenty of games for kids to play, from catching fish with
a magnet on the end of a rod to making your own fish with wooden blocks.
You don’t want to do something every day of your holiday. It wouldn’t
feel like a holiday if you did. But equally, you don’t want to hang about
the house every day. Now when I go home, it feels like you’ve got all sorts
of new options.
If you’re making a list of places to go for the school holidays, to Alton
Towers, Centerparcs and Disneyland Paris, you can now safely add Northern
Ireland. n Martin Doyle is a former Editor of The Irish Post. He now works
for The Times.
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