Ballintoy

Where it sits. Ballintoy is a village of about 140 people strung along the B15 coast road in north County Antrim, roughly five miles west of Ballycastle and the same distance east of Bushmills, inside a townland of 274 acres that also names the surrounding civil parish. The village itself is modest: a line of houses, two churches, a few shops and tea rooms on the ridge. What draws people is a kilometre north and some sixty metres below, at the foot of a steep hairpinned lane that drops down Knocksaughey hill. Ballintoy Harbour is a small stone shelter wedged between white chalk headlands, its piers built of blocky basalt and limestone, with open Atlantic in front and the flat-topped basalt stack of Sheep Island offshore.

The road down. The harbour lane is a genuinely narrow single-track descent with blind bends and passing places you have to plan for; drivers of anything longer than a family car generally leave it alone. Halfway down stands Bendhu House, a strange, terraced concrete building begun in the 1930s by the artist Newton Penprase, who built it slowly by hand over decades — it is a listed building and looks like nothing else on the coast. Above it, Ballintoy Parish Church, a small whitewashed Church of Ireland building, sits on the skyline and appears in almost every photograph taken from the harbour, because it is the one bright vertical against a dark headland. On Easter Sunday the harbour hosts a dawn service, which is the one morning of the year the car park fills before sunrise.

On screen. Ballintoy Harbour played Lordsport, the port town of the Iron Islands beneath the Greyjoy seat of Pyke, in the second season of HBO's Game of Thrones; the unit worked here in August 2011. It is where Theon Greyjoy steps ashore after nine years as a hostage of the Starks, finds nobody waiting for him, and is given a ride by a woman he tries to seduce on the way inland — his sister Yara. The same shoreline was used for his baptism into the faith of the Drowned God, the ritual dunking that comes with the line about what is dead never dying. The production dressed the real piers with fishing boats, nets and a longship, then digitally raised Pyke's towers and bridges on the cliffs behind; the castle itself never existed here, and the exterior modelling drew on Dunluce Castle further west. The harbour was used again for Iron Islands material in later seasons.

What you actually see today. The harbour is still a working slip with a handful of small boats, a lifebuoy station and a tiny seasonal café. West of the piers a shelf of raised chalk platform runs along the shore, pitted with rock pools and dotted with mushroom-shaped erosion stacks — the geology here is Ulster White Limestone overlain by dark basalt, and the boundary between the two is unusually legible in the cliff face. Follow the Causeway Coast Way west and within twenty minutes you reach the elephant-grey stacks below Ballintoy Church and then the dunes at White Park Bay; go east and the path climbs towards Larrybane and Carrick-a-Rede. In the village, the Fullerton Arms holds one of the carved oak doors made from beeches that Storm Gertrude brought down at the Dark Hedges in January 2016, each panel telling part of a season's story.

Practical detail. Parking at the harbour is limited to a small gravel area that fills by mid-morning in July and August; the overflow is the village, which adds a twenty-five minute walk each way including the climb back up. There are public toilets at the harbour and more in the village. Swimming is not sensible here — the bay is rocky, exposed and subject to strong surge — but the tidal pools, the sea arches and the light on the chalk make it one of the most photographed working harbours in Ireland. Boat trips to Sheep Island and along the stacks run from the harbour in summer, weather permitting, and the island holds a cormorant colony that is loud enough to hear from the pier.

Getting there and timing. Ballintoy sits on the Causeway Coastal Route between the Giant's Causeway and Ballycastle, about an hour and a half by car from Belfast and forty minutes from Coleraine. The Ulsterbus Causeway Rambler serves the village in summer, which is the easiest way to walk a one-way section of coast path. Light is the deciding factor: the harbour faces north-north-west, so it is flat and grey at midday and comes alive in late afternoon and at sunset, when the chalk goes warm and the stacks throw long shadows. Winter brings genuinely violent seas over the outer pier — spectacular from the safety of the upper road, and no place to stand at the water's edge.