Carncastle

Where it sits. Carncastle — spelled Cairncastle on many maps and signs — is a small village and civil parish in County Antrim, a few miles north of Larne and set back on high ground above the coastal village of Ballygally. The name combines the Irish word for a cairn with the English "castle". The settlement is tiny, in the low dozens of people, and the interest here is not the village but the ground above it: a line of basalt escarpments marking the eastern edge of the Antrim plateau, where farmland runs out to a rim of cliffs and the land drops several hundred metres to the coast road and the sea. Knock Dhu, the black hill, is the most prominent of these headlands, with the natural amphitheatre of the Sallagh Braes a short distance north.

On screen. Knock Dhu is where Game of Thrones begins in earnest. In the first episode of the series, "Winter Is Coming", Eddard Stark takes his sons north of Winterfell to execute Will, a deserter from the Night's Watch who has fled after seeing what waits beyond the Wall. The party rides across open grass, the man is beheaded with the Valyrian steel greatsword Ice, and Ned explains to Bran why the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword — the scene that establishes the series' moral world in about four minutes. It was filmed on the escarpment above Carncastle, on farmland with the basalt rim behind and nothing modern in frame. On the way home the party finds the dead direwolf and her pups, though that half of the sequence was shot in Tollymore Forest Park in County Down, sixty miles to the south.

The archaeology. About a mile west of the village, Knock Dhu carries a substantial Bronze Age promontory fort: three lines of bank and ditch cutting off the headland, the footings of roundhouses inside, and what appears to be a gatehouse. It was excavated for the first time in 2008 by a Time Team dig broadcast the following January, which established the scale of the settlement and its unusually commanding position. The wider parish holds raths, standing stones and the remains of an old church, and the ridge line has been used as a route and a lookout for millennia — from here the Antrim coast, Islandmagee, Belfast Lough and the Scottish coast at the Mull of Kintyre and the Rhins of Galloway are all in view on a clear day.

What you actually see today. There is no visitor centre, no marked Thrones trail and no signpost to the execution spot, and it is worth saying plainly that the filming location is working farmland in private ownership. What is open is the landscape around it. The Ulster Way climbs onto the plateau near here, and the walk along the top of the Sallagh Braes — a horseshoe of columnar basalt cliffs formed where a huge landslip pulled away from the plateau edge — gives the same terrain, the same views and the same weather, legitimately and for nothing. Below, the Antrim Coast Road engineered by William Bald in the 1830s runs along the shore, and Ballygally Castle, a Scottish-style tower house of 1625, is now a hotel with a reputation for ghost stories and, more recently, one of the carved doors made from Dark Hedges timber.

The village itself. Carncastle keeps a parish church, a primary school and a flute band whose history reaches back to the nineteenth century, and its life is agricultural — sheep and cattle on the high fields, silage on the better ground. The parish name attaches to a wide scatter of farms rather than a single street, and visitors driving through often fail to notice they have passed it. That obscurity is part of why the production chose the hill: an hour from Belfast, twenty minutes from a base at Larne, and empty enough that a hundred crew could work for days without a road closure.

Getting there and timing. Larne is the nearest town, with a railway station served from Belfast in about an hour, and the coast road north from Larne to Ballygally takes ten minutes by car. Parking near the Sallagh Braes is limited to a few roadside spaces, so arrive early on summer weekends. The escarpment is exposed and the grass steep; boots are sensible and the edge is unfenced. Clear, cold winter days deliver the longest views over the North Channel, while May and June give the greenest ground and the best chance of the light that makes the basalt columns stand out.