Shipyards, Basalt and One Victorian Gin Palace: Belfast in Order of Importance

Belfast is a city you can cross on foot in half an hour, attached to a hinterland you could not exhaust in a fortnight. That mismatch is the entire planning problem. Visitors land with two days, spend both inside the ring of Victorian sandstone around Donegall Square, and leave with an impression of a pleasant small city with very good bars. All of that is true. None of it is why you should get on the plane.

What follows is a ranking, and it is meant seriously: this is the order in which we would defend these things if the trip kept shrinking. Two of them are not strictly in Belfast at all, which is not a dodge. The city has spent its whole modern life as the door to the north-east corner of Ireland, and the coast beyond it is part of what it offers.

1. The shipyard, and everything it left behind

Titanic Belfast takes the arrivals and deserves most of them, but the common mistake is to treat it as one building rather than a district. Budget half a day and walk the whole yard.

The museum sits in an angular, hull-shaped shell on the ground where the Harland and Wolff slipways ran, and its galleries were substantially reworked a few years ago. The strongest rooms are not the ones about the ship. They are the ones about the city: Belfast at the turn of the twentieth century, when linen, rope, tobacco and shipbuilding made this one of the industrial engines of the empire, with the tenements and the mortality figures that went with it. The mocked-up shipyard ride divides people and often carries the longest internal queue; we would not grieve over skipping it.

Outside, free and largely ignored, are the slipways themselves. The plan of the hull is laid out at full scale in the ground, with benches at the height of the ship's decks and the names of those who died in the sinking set into the surface. Standing at the head of the slip gives you the length of the thing in a way no gallery can. Along the quay sits SS Nomadic, the tender that carried first and second-class passengers out to the anchored liner at Cherbourg, restored and billed by its custodians as the last White Star Line vessel afloat. Further on, the Thompson Dry Dock and its Pump House let you walk down onto the dock floor and stand under where the hull sat. The Titanic Hotel occupies Harland and Wolff's old headquarters, and the restored drawing offices are generally open to look at even if you are not staying, though it is worth confirming before you turn up.

Overhead stand Samson and Goliath, the yellow gantry cranes that are now protected monuments, with a working yard beyond them that has changed hands more than once in recent years. Timed tickets for the museum are usual and sell out in summer, so book. It is roughly a twenty-five minute walk from the city centre along the Lagan, or a short ride on the Glider G2.

2. The west of the city, and the walls still standing

The Falls Road and the Shankill Road run roughly parallel, a few hundred metres apart, divided along much of their length by walls, fences and gates that are politely called peace lines. The best known stretch, on Cupar Way, is covered in visitors' signatures. The gates at Lanark Way, which link the two roads, are usually closed overnight. That is the single most useful fact about Belfast's geography, and no museum will teach it to you as fast as ten minutes standing there.

The conventional way in is a black taxi tour, typically ninety minutes to two hours, and the better operators will pair you with drivers from both communities or at least be frank about which one they come from. Done well it is the most valuable thing you will do here. Done badly it is a grievance monologue, so ask what the format is when you book.

You can also go alone. The Glider G1 runs along the Falls Road, and Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, the Irish-language arts centre with a café and bookshop, makes a sane anchor point. From there it is a short walk to the International Wall with its rotating political murals, to Bombay Street, rebuilt after it burned in 1969 and backing directly onto the wall behind Clonard Monastery, and across to the Shankill and its memorial garden. Two things to hold onto: the murals change and are painted over, so what you saw in a photograph may be gone; and these are ordinary residential streets where people live. Ask before photographing anyone.

3. The Causeway Coast, given a whole day or none

The Giant's Causeway is around sixty miles north of the city. By motorway that is typically an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half. Along the Antrim coast road through Larne, Glenarm, Carnlough, Waterfoot and Cushendall it is closer to three hours with the stops you will inevitably make. Half-day coach trips exist. They are the single worst use of a Belfast day we can think of.

The plan that works: leave early on the coast road, with the morning light over the sea and the Glens of Antrim opening on your left, take lunch somewhere around Ballintoy, hit the Causeway itself in the late afternoon when the tour buses have gone and the low sun rakes across the basalt, then drive home on the motorway in the dark. The columns, whose number is usually given as around forty thousand, take perhaps forty minutes at the stones. The point is the clifftop path above them and the long flight of the Shepherd's Steps. The National Trust visitor centre operates a combined parking and entry arrangement that has changed more than once, so check what applies before you set off.

Within twenty minutes of the Causeway you have Dunluce Castle on its sea stack, the Old Bushmills Distillery whose licence is conventionally dated to 1608, the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge on timed tickets that close in high wind, and the beech avenue of the Dark Hedges off the Bregagh Road, where through traffic is barred and parking is some way off. Choose two. Attempting all four turns a good day into a car park survey.

4. The Ulster Museum and the gardens around it

Free at the time of writing, and the best wet afternoon in Belfast. The Ulster Museum stands inside the Botanic Gardens and holds three things worth the walk on their own: Takabuti, the Egyptian mummy unwrapped in Belfast in the 1830s and studied repeatedly since; the gold and jewellery recovered from the Girona, the Spanish Armada galleass wrecked off the north coast in 1588 and salvaged in the 1960s; and The Troubles and Beyond, a gallery that handles the last sixty years with more nerve than most institutions here manage.

Outside, the Palm House by Charles Lanyon, with ironwork by Richard Turner, and the Tropical Ravine, a sunken Victorian glasshouse restored and reopened in 2018. Queen's University's Lanyon Building is a few minutes further on. Allow two to three hours for the lot; it is around a twenty-five minute walk south from the city centre.

5. Crumlin Road Gaol

Lanyon designed this too. It opened in the 1840s, held prisoners until 1996 and reopened as a visitor attraction in 2012. Guided tours generally run through the day and take about an hour and a quarter, and they are properly told: the tunnel running under the road to the courthouse, the holding cells, C-Wing, the condemned cell and the execution chamber, and the burials inside the walls. The courthouse opposite is a fire-gutted ruin, which makes its own point. Book ahead, and think twice about young children.

6. Cave Hill, for the shape of the place

Belfast sits in a bowl, and until you have looked down into it none of the geography makes sense. Cave Hill rises to around 368 metres on the northern edge, and the standard approach starts at Belfast Castle, a Scottish Baronial pile built in 1870 and handed to the city in the 1930s. From there it is a climb of two to three hours return, usually muddy, to McArt's Fort on the summit crag — the profile locals call Napoleon's Nose, and where tradition places Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen swearing their oath in 1795. The reward is the lough, the cranes, the whole grid of the city, and the Mourne Mountains on the horizon on a clear day. Divis and the Black Mountain, National Trust land to the west, offer a similar view from a boardwalk ridge trail with less climbing.

The Victorian city you will walk through anyway

None of these justify a flight; all of them fill the gaps well. City Hall, completed in 1906, runs free guided tours on most days and keeps a decent exhibition inside. The Crown Liquor Saloon, owned by the National Trust and facing the Europa Hotel on Great Victoria Street, is a Victorian gin palace with intact snugs. The Grand Opera House, a Frank Matcham design, has been handsomely restored, and the Ulster Hall down the road still has its Mulholland Grand Organ and the Ulster Orchestra. The Linen Hall Library, founded in 1788, welcomes visitors into its reading rooms and holds the Northern Ireland Political Collection, which is a quietly extraordinary thing to be able to walk into. St Anne's Cathedral carries the Spire of Hope. St George's Market, the Victorian covered hall near the river, typically trades Friday through Sunday, with fish on the Friday, food and craft on the Saturday, and music on the Sunday.

Eat the local things while you are there: an Ulster fry with soda farl and potato bread, wheaten bread with everything, dulse and yellowman from a market stall, Comber potatoes in early summer, Lough Neagh eels if you find them.

What to leave out, and what to add with more time

Leave out hop-on-hop-off buses in a city this walkable, and leave out Stormont unless the politics genuinely interests you, though the roughly mile-long avenue up to Parliament Buildings makes a pleasant walk. Skip any Causeway trip billed as half a day.

With a fourth or fifth day, the Ulster Folk Museum and Ulster Transport Museum at Cultra are around fifteen to twenty minutes by train; the transport collection holds a Dunmurry-built DeLorean, and the folk museum has been working through a long redevelopment, so check what is actually open. Mount Stewart on Strangford Lough, the Mourne Mountains roughly an hour south, the Game of Thrones Studio Tour at Banbridge and the guided cliff path of the Gobbins on Islandmagee all repay a day.

Sequencing it

Three days, in this order. Day one: city centre in the morning, Titanic Quarter from lunchtime, Cathedral Quarter in the evening. Day two: the coast, all of it. Day three: west Belfast with a guide first thing, Crumlin Road Gaol before lunch, the Ulster Museum and the Palm House after it.

Then break that order the moment the forecast tells you to. Rain falls here on something like half the days of any month, and the only real rule is that the coast day and the museum day must be able to swap places at short notice. Build the trip so they can, and Belfast will treat you far better than its reputation suggests.