Limavady

Straight Streets and Danny Boy

Main Street runs dead straight through the middle of Limavady, part of a cruciform plan laid out in 1610 when Sir Thomas Phillips built his "Newtown" here. The bars have not strayed far from it in the four centuries since. Owen's sits at number 50, the Corner Bar at 41, the Depot at 88; a few turns away are the Crown and the Douglas on Irish Green Street, Granny Annie's on Catherine Street, Harkin's and Banters side by side on Linenhall Street. These are traditional town bars rather than gastropubs, and the town has more of them than a place this size usually keeps.

Halfway along Main Street a plaque marks the former home of Jane Ross, who in the mid-nineteenth century noted down the melody that became the "Londonderry Air" and, later, "Danny Boy." Local tradition has her taking it from a passing fiddler, a blind musician named Jimmy McCurry. The town still holds a jazz and blues festival in Danny Boy's name.

The River Roe and Basalt Heights

The reason to stay a week, though, is the walking, and most of it is at the Roe Valley Country Park on the town's south-western edge. The River Roe runs three miles through steep wooded gorges here, with footpaths on both banks linked by a string of footbridges, so you can cross and come back a different way. The park is full of the remains of the linen trade: flax-drying fields with watch towers, derelict mill buildings, and a surviving waterwheel. There is also a disused generating station, which in 1896 was the first hydro-electric power station in Northern Ireland. O'Cahan's Rock, named for the clan whose seat the town was, marks a bathing spot on the river. Salmon and brown trout are fished with a permit.

North of the town the flat-topped basalt mass of Binevenagh fills the skyline, 385 metres of sixty-million-year-old cliff. The Bishop's Road climbs across the plateau to a cliff-top viewpoint looking over Lough Foyle to Inishowen in Donegal, the Magilligan peninsula and Benone beach; a small lake sits on the top. It is about fifteen minutes by car, as are Downhill Demesne and the Mussenden Temple, the clifftop rotunda a bishop built in 1785 to hold his library.

Roe Park and Broighter Gold

On the historic Roe Park estate at the foot of Mullagh Hill, where Saint Columba is said to have presided over a gathering of kings around 575 AD, there is now a resort with a golf course, a spa and hotel dining. In 1896 two ploughmen turned up the Broighter Gold near Lough Foyle, a first-century-BC hoard that includes a miniature gold boat complete with oars and a torc later called the finest example of Irish La Tène goldworking. It now lives in Dublin.

Rails, Roads and a Prime Minister

Bellarena station is about five miles off, with direct trains to Derry, Coleraine and Belfast; the A2 bypass carries the traffic that once ground through the centre. Outside the council offices stands a bronze statue of William Ferguson Massey, born and schooled in Limavady, who emigrated and became Prime Minister of New Zealand.