Dunseverick

A harbour hamlet between two coasts

The harbour at Dunseverick is a small enclosure of limestone blocks, hemmed in on the landward side by limestone cliffs, and it was once busy with fishing and boatbuilding. The car park above it has public toilets, including a disabled toilet on a RADAR lock, and the coast-path facilities here run to upgraded washrooms and showers you can book. It is a practical place to start or finish a day on foot.

The hamlet itself is a scatter of white houses strung along the A2 between Bushmills and Ballycastle, sitting above a low, rugged shoreline. In one direction are the high basalt cliffs of the Giant's Causeway; in the other, the chalk and dunes of White Park Bay. You come here for the coast, and the village arranges itself accordingly.

Food, beds and a practical base

For food and a bed, the Causeway Tavern is the licensed pub, family-run with en-suite rooms, set in the Lisnagunogue part of the parish on Whitepark Road. Michaela and Mark keep it, and recent guests talk about generous breakfasts and a fire lit in the bar. One reviewer, Andy H, called it an "absolutely lovely place with great charm." A council play park and picnic area is a short walk away.

A little along the road, the Bothy at White Park Bay is a roadside café that does the kind of cooking walkers want at the end of a windy morning, though what's on depends on the day: bacon and lentil soup, cauliflower and broccoli soup, pancakes with syrup and bacon, a roast-beef sandwich, a Smokey Joe melt, a steak sandwich, and apple-crumble slice or a cinnamon roll to finish. For anything more, Bushmills, with its distillery and its shops, is under four miles off.

Two paths and a basalt stronghold

The walking is the real reason to stay. West, the North Antrim Cliff Path runs 7.3 kilometres to the Giant's Causeway across National Trust organic farmland where cattle graze and dogs are kept on leads. It passes Port Moon, with its former salmon fishery and a surviving fishermen's bothy, then Bengore Head, Benbane Head and the Amphitheatre, before dropping the 162 Shepherd's Steps to the stones. Peregrines may be seen on the cliffs, and chough turn up now and then. East, the Causeway Coast Way carries on 7.8 kilometres to Ballintoy Harbour, past a natural basalt arch at Gid Point, Portbraddan and White Park Bay, though the bay section may be impassable at high tide, when you take the road instead.

Dunseverick Castle stands on a steep basalt stack, an ancient royal site. The annals call it Dun Sobhairce, and it was occupied by the seafaring Dál Riada kingdom, later passing to the Earls of Ulster and then to O'Cahan and MacDonnell hands. Tradition holds that St Patrick came here and baptised a local man, Olcán, later Bishop of Armoy; the wet hollow on the site is still called St Patrick's Well. Vikings raided it, a Scottish army under Robert Munro wrecked it in 1642, and Cromwellian troops took it in the 1650s, after which it was never refortified or reoccupied. All that stands now is a small residential tower, part of which slid away with the rock face in 1978 and was later shored up.

An older bell and the parish church

The parish church, up from the shore, was consecrated in 1832. Its bell is older than the building: cast in 1815, it came from a dismantled church in County Clare and was dedicated here in 1961.

Three cats at the tavern

Back at the Tavern, the household includes three cats, Lucky, Foxy and Rambo, who have the run of the place.