Britain’s most scenic drives: The Causeway Coastal Route, Northern Ireland

On a quest to find the country's most glorious roads, Annunciata Elwes explores Northern Ireland's Causeway Coastal Route.

The aerial view of the two islands in Carrick-a-Rede with the rope bridge connecting the two islands in Ireland
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)
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It is possible to power through all nine mythical glens of Antrim in one day, whizzing along the 195 miles between Belfast and Derry.

But why would you rush when there's scenery like this to enjoy on one of Britain's most scenic drives?

Dunluce castle in Northern Ireland aerial

You’d miss so much — from the volcano frozen in time that is Giant’s Causeway, with its 40,000 basalt columns, the moody castles of Dunseverick (on a wave-bashed peninsula visited by St Patrick), Dunluce, Glenarm and Carrickfergus, through the brooding Dark Hedges that served as Westeros’s Kingsroad in Game of Thrones.

The rope bridge of your dreams? Carrick a Rede, County Antrim

The rope bridge of your dreams? Or your nightmares? Carrick a Rede, County Antrim
(Image credit: Getty Images/National Geographic)

Then there are the cliff caves and suspension bridges at the Edwardian Gobbins, overlooking an Irish Sea where dolphins dance, Torr Head for views of Scotland and 18th-century Mussenden Temple on a 120ft clifftop above the Atlantic.

Dundrum Bay County Down Northern Ireland

Take a weekend or, better yet, a week.

Murlough Bay ,Benmore ,Fair Head Co. Antrim Northern Ireland Aerial

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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