Prior to conceiving and developing the Ulster Way, he was also the instigator and driving force of a campaign to secure County Antrim’s breathtakingly beautiful White Park Bay from developers, which raised £15,000 from the public to buy the site and then hand it over to the National Trust, which still looks after it today. Imagine what it must have been like to convince people in the 1940s that townies should be encouraged to roam their landĬapper was a career civil servant but his greatest contribution to Northern Ireland was his passion for the countryside, and his voluntary work preserving and promoting it was decades ahead of the time and has proved priceless. Across this unpromising backdrop strode the intrepid, irrepressible Wilfrid Capper. It’s a tricky balance in the 21st century, but imagine what it must have been like trying to convince rural people in Ireland in the 1940s that townies should be encouraged to roam their lands just for “exercise”.
Consequently, most off-road walking routes depend on the goodwill of numerous private landowners and alliances with groups such as local councils and the National Trust. Access to the countryside in general is much more restricted in Northern Ireland than in mainland Britain: there are no national parks, far fewer public rights of way, and land ownership is much more fragmented with a patchwork of smaller farms and estates. But not as remarkable as its actual birth. The intervening decades have been turbulent here, to say the least, and that the Ulster Way survived long enough to be reborn is remarkable. Portbraddan feels ‘gloriously isolated’ Photograph: Economic Images/Alamy What I’d actually found was part of the Ulster Way, a 636-mile network of walking trails looping the circumference of Northern Ireland, which was first envisaged 75 years ago and, over the past year or so, has been revamped and re-mapped to mark this anniversary. To my great delight I found a network of rough paths connecting glens, grassy hills, fields, pockets of woodland and quieter country roads, all within half an hour of jogging up from the city.įittingly – for the hills over the east of the city were the childhood playground of CS Lewis – it felt as if I’d discovered some Narnia-esque portal to another world.
Keen to get off pavement and away from traffic, my heels took to the hills, following no particular route other than a vague plan to keep ascending. I was living in a built-up suburb of east Belfast, but one of the unappreciated and beguiling features of that complex city is the easy access to the beautiful and diverse countryside that rings it. B ack when I had no children and, consequently, the seesaw of life’s energy still tipped towards surplus rather than shortfall, I got into the habit of long, early morning runs.