Binevenagh

Where it sits. Binevenagh is the abrupt western end of the Antrim plateau: a steep-sided hill in County Londonderry whose basalt cliffs rear about 385 metres above the flat Magilligan peninsula, with Lough Foyle and the Donegal hills of Inishowen beyond. The name comes from the Irish for Foibhne's peak. Geologically it is the same sixty-million-year-old lava pile that forms the Giant's Causeway, here sliced off in a great curving escarpment above the villages of Bellarena, Downhill, Castlerock and the long sands of Benone. The area is designated both an Area of Special Scientific Interest and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the latter covering 138 square kilometres of cliff, plateau, farmland and dune.

On screen. The grassy shelf below the summit cliffs is the Dothraki Sea. At the end of the fifth season of Game of Thrones, in "Mother's Mercy", Drogon carries Daenerys Targaryen out of the fighting pit at Meereen and sets her down, exhausted and injured, on a hillside far to the east; she wakes beside the dragon in his rocky lair, walks out across open grass looking for food, and is slowly encircled by a Dothraki khalasar riding in a widening spiral around her, dropping the ring that Jorah Mormont later finds. That entire sequence, and the material at the start of the sixth season in which she is taken captive by Khal Jhaqo, was filmed on Binevenagh. Nothing was built here: the crew used the plateau's tussocked grass, its scattered basalt outcrops and the absence of any building or hedge on the skyline, then removed the Atlantic from behind the camera in the wide shots. Riders and horses came from local equestrian centres.

The Bishop's Road. The way up is one of the more improbable roads in Ireland. The Bishop's Road climbs from the coast at Downhill to the plateau in a series of hairpins, and was laid out in the late eighteenth century at the expense of Frederick Hervey, the Earl-Bishop of Derry, partly to give work to local people and partly to get himself to a view. It still delivers: at Gortmore, a roadside viewpoint looks out over the whole Magilligan plain, the mouth of the Foyle and the Donegal coast. The viewpoint holds a large sculpture of Manannán mac Lir, the sea god of Irish myth, carved by John Sutton and installed in 2013; it was stolen in January 2015 in a bizarre and well-publicised theft, the thieves leaving a wooden cross bearing a line from the commandments in its place, and a replacement was made and put back later the same year. The figure stands with arms spread inside a stylised boat, facing the sea he was supposed to rule, and the platform around it is the single easiest viewpoint on the whole escarpment.

What you actually see today. From Gortmore a short circular path leads towards the cliff edge; from the forest road on the plateau, tracks lead to Binevenagh Lake, an artificial trout fishery sitting improbably close to the drop, and on to the cliff top itself. The escarpment shelters arctic-alpine plants left over from the last glaciation, clinging to ledges out of reach of sheep, and the reserve is one of the botanical highlights of the north. Below the cliffs, the Magilligan peninsula spreads out as a triangle of dune, farmland and army training ground ending in a Martello tower of 1812 at the Foyle narrows. The updraughts on the escarpment are so reliable that the Ulster Gliding Club flies from Bellarena below and hang-glider and paraglider pilots use the slopes routinely; a hill-climb motorsport event has run on the Eagles Rock road in July for decades.

A darker note. The hill has taken aircraft. On 24 June 1944 a Consolidated Liberator of No. 5 Squadron, returning to RAF Ballykelly from an anti-submarine patrol off Iceland, struck Binevenagh on its third attempt to land in poor visibility, killing all nine men on board. Wreckage from wartime crashes still turns up on the slopes, and the mountain's habit of collecting cloud when the coast below is clear is not a coincidence.

Getting there and timing. Limavady is fifteen minutes away, Coleraine about twenty-five, Derry forty; Bellarena and Castlerock stations on the Belfast–Derry line sit at the foot of the hill, which makes a rail-and-walk day realistic. The Bishop's Road is narrow, steep and single-track in places, with no barrier on the seaward side, and it is best avoided in ice. Take boots for anything beyond the roadside viewpoints — the plateau is boggy and the cliff edge is unfenced. Late spring and summer give the flowers, the gliders and the long evenings; a crisp winter afternoon gives the sharpest view across the Foyle to Donegal.