Tollymore Forest Park

Where it sits. Tollymore lies in the Shimna valley at the northern foot of the Mourne Mountains, three kilometres west of Newcastle in County Down. Its 630 hectares run from riverside meadow at about forty metres up onto the granite slopes below Slievenabrock and Luke's Mountain, so the park is effectively a doorway between the drumlin farmland of Down and the high Mournes behind. The Shimna River cuts through the middle of it in a series of rock gorges and pools, and on the clearest days the summit of Slieve Donard, at 850 metres the highest point in Northern Ireland, shows above the treetops.

The story behind it. The demesne was laid out from the eighteenth century by the Magennis and then the Hamilton families, Earls of Clanbrassil, who planted the valley with exotic conifers and scattered it with follies in a deliberately picturesque manner. What survives is a catalogue of Georgian landscape gardening in stone: the Barbican Gate on the Bryansford road, a mock-medieval arch of 1786; the Clanbrassil Barn, given a facade with a spire so that it reads as a church from a distance; and the Hermitage of 1770, a small stone chamber above a bend in the river built by the second Earl in memory of a friend. Sixteen bridges cross the Shimna and its tributaries, several of them Georgian — the Old Bridge dates from 1726, Parnell's Bridge from 1774 and the elegant, wide-arched Foley's Bridge from 1787. Timber from the estate is traditionally said to have gone into the fitting-out of White Star liners built at Harland and Wolff in Belfast, the Titanic among them. In 1955 Tollymore became Northern Ireland's first state forest park.

On screen. The forest opens Game of Thrones. The first sequence of the first episode — three rangers of the Night's Watch riding out through a tunnel in the Wall and into a snow-dusted wood, where they find wildling corpses arranged in a spiral around a tree — was filmed among Tollymore's conifers, with artificial snow laid on the forest floor. The production came back repeatedly, and the park stood in for both the Haunted Forest beyond the Wall and the Wolfswood around Winterfell. Sequences shot here include:

• the prologue massacre of the ranging party by the first White Walker seen in the series
• the Stark party finding the dead direwolf with a stag's antler in her throat, and the pups that become the children's companions
• Bran, Rickon, Osha and Hodor fleeing north through the trees after Winterfell falls
• Riverlands woodland scenes with Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane
• the Brotherhood Without Banners' forest camp in the third season

The recognisable spots are the river path near Parnell's Bridge and the stands of tall conifers on the Curraghard side.

What you actually see today. Four waymarked trails leave the main car park, from a short river walk of about a kilometre and a half to the eight-kilometre Mountain Trail that climbs to the Curraghard viewpoint for a long prospect over Newcastle, Dundrum Bay and the Irish Sea. The arboretum holds Himalayan cedars, monkey puzzles, giant redwoods and a Monterey cypress avenue, several of them among the largest specimens in Ireland. There is a caravan and camping site, a small cafe near the entrance, and a mountain-bike trail network. The Ulster Way passes through, and Tollymore is the traditional approach for walkers heading for Hare's Gap and the Mourne Wall. Red squirrels hold on here against grey competition, otters work the Shimna, and dippers can be watched from almost any of the bridges, bobbing on midstream boulders before walking underwater to feed.

Getting there and timing. The park is signposted from the B180 at Bryansford, four minutes from Newcastle, about ninety minutes from Belfast by the A24. Buses run to Newcastle and a local service reaches Bryansford; from the town it is a walk of roughly forty-five minutes. A vehicle charge applies at the barrier and the park opens daily from ten in the morning until dusk. The main car park, the cafe and the first stretch of riverside path are surfaced and manageable for wheelchairs and pushchairs, but the majority of the trails involve steps, tree roots and steep river banks. Late spring gives beech leaf at its freshest and the Shimna in good flow; late October turns the broadleaf sections copper and gold. Summer weekends and school holidays fill the car park by mid-morning, and the barrier closes when it is full. Wet weather is normal here — the Mournes catch the rain first — and the granite river rocks become slippery, so the pools below Foley's Bridge deserve caution rather than enthusiasm.