23/06/2026
Love living by the 9 Glens 💕
🌊 The Antrim coast road was built between 1832 and 1842 because the people of the Glens of Antrim had no other reliable land connection to the rest of Ireland. Before the road was cut into the cliff face, the nine glens that open onto the Antrim coast — Glenarm, Glencloy, Glenariff, Glenballyemon, Glenaan, Glencorp, Glendun, Glenshesk, Glentaisie — were connected to the world beyond them primarily by sea, and communities that faced a bad harvest or a medical emergency had no fast road to relief. The road that William Bald and his work gangs cut from the basalt cliffs at enormous effort and expense was an act of practical necessity that produced, as its incidental byproduct, one of the most beautiful coastal drives in Europe.
The Glens of Antrim themselves are one of the least visited and most culturally significant landscapes in Ireland — nine glacially carved valleys opening onto the Antrim plateau above and the North Channel below, each with its own river, its own community, its own particular character. The Glens were one of the last strongholds of the Ulster Irish language — Irish was spoken in parts of the Glens into the early 20th century, maintained in communities that the road's isolation had protected from some of the pressures that eroded the language elsewhere. The folklore of the Glens is dense with the mythology of the Ulster Cycle — this is Cú Chulainn's coastline, the place where Deirdre and the sons of Uisneach fled to Scotland and returned to their doom, the coast from which the Irish missionaries set out for Iona and Columba's Scotland.
Ossian's Grave in Glenariff — the supposed burial place of Oisín, the poet-warrior son of Fionn mac Cumhaill — sits above one of the most beautiful of the glens, a court cairn from the Neolithic that the local tradition adopted as the grave of the mythological figure, the landscape and the mythology settling into each other over millennia until it became impossible to say which came first.
The road follows the coast. The coast follows the mythology. The mythology follows the road home. 🌿