Torr Head

Where it sits. Torr Head is a stubby rock headland on the Straits of Moyle, in the civil parish of Culfeightrin, about eight miles east of Ballycastle and five miles north of Cushendun. It is the closest point in Northern Ireland to Scotland: the Mull of Kintyre lies roughly twelve miles across the water, near enough that individual fields and the white flash of the lighthouse are visible with the naked eye on a good day. A rocky knoll rises to about 67 metres above the sea, crowned by the roofless block of an old signal station. Geologically this corner is different from the basalt coast to the west — a ridge of ancient Dalradian rock runs inland from the head, overlain by limestone, which is why the fields here are greener and the cliffs less regular.

The story behind it. The headland carried a cashel, or stone ringfort, known as Dún Bharraigh, which local tradition ties to Barach, a figure from the Deirdre of the Sorrows cycle — the tale of the flight of the sons of Uisneach to Scotland and their fatal return across exactly this stretch of water. The fort was largely destroyed after 1818 when a coastguard station was built on the site. In 1822 Lloyd's of London erected a signal station on the summit, part of the network that reported inbound shipping so that owners and underwriters in Britain learned of arrivals days before the vessels docked. Because there was no way to pass messages between Torr Head and the Rathlin East lighthouse, Guglielmo Marconi's assistant George Kemp ran wireless telegraphy experiments across this water in the summer of 1898, linking Ballycastle and Rathlin — among the first commercial uses of radio anywhere. During the Irish War of Independence the coastguard quarters were raided in September 1920 and destroyed that November; the signal station was abandoned in the 1920s, and both buildings are now shells.

On screen. Torr Head is not itself a Game of Thrones filming location, and it is worth being straight about that rather than inventing a scene for it. What it is, is the hinge of the coastal locations circuit: the Torr Road links Cushendun, where Melisandre's cave sits at the end of the beach, with Murlough Bay and Fair Head, which supplied the Iron Islands and Dragonstone cliff work, and it does so through fifteen miles of single-track switchbacks that are as cinematic as anything the production filmed. Drive it slowly and you pass the same combination the location scouts were after — treeless headlands, hard sea light and a horizon with Scotland on it.

What you actually see today. A rough lane drops from the Torr Road to a small parking area, from which a short, steep path climbs the knoll to the ruins. The walls are unstable and unfenced in places, and the ground beyond them falls straight to the sea. Immediately south, in Portaleen Bay, lies the small harbour also called Torr Head Harbour, where a salmon fishery station operated during the migration season; the currents that made the fishing good — the Moyle races funnelling between Ireland and Kintyre — are visible as slicks and overfalls from the top. Cod migrate past on the same route. Seals use the rocks, and the summit is a good place to watch gannets and shearwaters in an onshore wind. Fields run almost to the cliff edge here, and the drystone walls and small enclosures on the slopes are old, which gives the headland a worked, lived-in character quite unlike the empty moorland above Fair Head a few miles west.

Getting there and timing. The Torr Road leaves the A2 near Cushendun and rejoins it near Ballycastle. It is single-track for most of its length, with blind summits, gradients that will surprise a heavily loaded car, and passing places that require attention rather than optimism; it is signed as unsuitable for caravans and coaches, and that advice is not decorative. From Ballycastle to the head takes about twenty-five minutes. There are no facilities anywhere on the route, no fuel, and patchy mobile coverage.

Timing and light. The headland faces east and north-east, so it is at its best early in the day, when Kintyre and Islay come out of the haze and the water between is silver. Evenings are better for the drive itself, with the low sun on the hillsides above the road. Settled weather matters more here than season: in rain the road is greasy, the view goes, and the ruin is just a wet wall. On a clear day it is one of the few places in Ireland where you can stand on one country and read the geography of another in detail.