Downhill Strand

Where it sits. Downhill Strand — better known along the coast as Benone Strand — is a seven-mile run of hard, pale sand on the County Londonderry coast, curving west from the cliffs below Mussenden Temple to Magilligan Point at the mouth of Lough Foyle. It is one of the longest beaches in Ireland and holds Blue Flag and Seaside Award status. The A2 runs behind it, and so does the Belfast–Derry railway, which threads the headland at the eastern end through tunnels cut in the 1840s and emerges at the little halt at Downhill: from the sand you can watch a train appear out of a cliff. Behind the western half rise the sudden basalt cliffs of Binevenagh; ahead, across the Foyle, the hills of Inishowen in Donegal.

On screen. This beach is Dragonstone. In the opening episode of the second season of Game of Thrones, "The North Remembers", Melisandre burns the carved wooden idols of the Seven on the shore below Stannis Baratheon's fortress while his household watches; Stannis walks into the fire and draws out a burning sword that the red priestess proclaims to be Lightbringer, the hero's blade of her faith. The scene was shot here on the open sand with the cliffs behind the camera. What the show does not show is the landmark directly above: Mussenden Temple stands on the cliff crown at the eastern end of this beach, and the production simply framed it out, shooting west along the strand where nothing breaks the horizon. Later seasons moved Dragonstone's castle and harbour to the Basque coast of Spain, but the beach where Stannis burned the gods of his ancestors is this one, and it is free to walk any day of the year.

The estate above. The eastern end of the strand sits beneath Downhill Demesne, the great cliff-top estate laid out from the 1770s by Frederick Hervey, fourth Earl of Bristol and Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry. The Earl-Bishop's mansion is now a roofless shell, gutted by fire in 1851, rebuilt, and finally abandoned after military billeting in the Second World War; the walled garden, ice house, dovecote and the theatrical Bishop's Gate survive, and the whole demesne is National Trust. Mussenden Temple, the little domed rotunda on the cliff edge, was built in 1785 as a library. From the beach it reads as a folly perched impossibly close to the drop, which is exactly the effect its builder wanted.

What you actually see today. The sand is firm enough that cars are permitted onto sections of Benone, a long-standing local practice that still surprises visitors, and there are lifeguarded areas in summer and a well-equipped complex at Benone with a caravan park, playing areas and a café. The Atlantic swell arrives here with real force, which makes it one of the north coast's serious surf, kitesurfing and land-yachting beaches; the water is cold enough for a good wetsuit year round. Walk west far enough and you reach Magilligan Point, where a Martello tower of 1812 guards the narrows and a small ferry crosses to Greencastle in Donegal. Walk east and the sand ends at Downhill village, from which a steep path climbs through the Black Glen to the temple. Because the beach is so long and so straight, distances deceive: the temple that looks fifteen minutes away from the middle of the strand is closer to forty on foot, and the wind usually decides how it feels.

Wildlife and weather. The dunes behind the strand are part of a large protected dune system with marram-stabilised ridges, orchids in early summer and one of the biggest wintering wader and wildfowl assemblages on the north coast in the shallows of the Foyle nearby. Wind is the constant: this shore faces north-west into the open Atlantic, and the difference between a still June morning and a January gale here is the difference between a picnic and a sandblasting. Storm days are spectacular from the clifftop above, where spray comes over the temple wall.

Getting there and timing. Castlerock railway station is a mile from the eastern end of the beach, with direct trains from Derry, Coleraine and Belfast, which makes this one of the few Westeros locations in Northern Ireland reachable without a car; Benone has large free-standing car parking off the A2. Coleraine is fifteen minutes by road, Derry about forty. For photography the beach faces north, so the light is best in the last two hours of the day, when the temple above catches sun and the wet sand mirrors it. Check tide tables before driving onto the sand, and keep well clear of the soft channel at the Articlave stream mouth.