Northern Ireland’s scenery is too awe-inspiring to be contained by any single myth or deity – there’s space and time for them all – especially when travelling by bike

Having grown up in southernmost England in the Eighties and Nineties, my awareness of Northern Ireland started and ended with grim news reports about bombs and bloodshed. About the actual place, its history, culture and geography, I knew almost nothing. Plenty of friends and relatives went on holiday to Scotland or Wales, but no one crossed the Irish Sea. This unconscious blockade remained in place until my early-30s when I met my partner, Anton, whose roots lay in rural North Antrim. The learning curve was steep, but a key turning point came when, sitting outside a cafe in Derry as the streets filled with besuited marching men thumping bellymounted drums, Anton thrust into my hands a copy of A Place Apart by the late, great travel writer Dervla Murphy.

An account of many weeks spent cycling around Northern Ireland, A Place Apart is a travel book like no other. Most extraordinary is the time of its setting: Murphy cycled to Northern Ireland from her home in the south at the height of the Troubles, summer 1976, and didn’t flinch at sparking up conversations with strangers in some of the diciest locations. These interactions she found addictive, the place beguiling. By the end of her travels, she was urging her friends to visit the north, assuring them that they would “find the people as welcoming [as in the south], the scenery as good, the roads better, and the weather no worse.” To my friends from southern England, I would go further: Northern Ireland beats our region on all these points – except perhaps the weather. And now I’m back here seeking to prove my case.

Our journey begins beneath the ramparts of Carrickfergus castle, built by the Anglo-Norman knight John de Courcy in 1177, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough. It was here that Protestant King William III first set foot in Ireland in 1690 to finish the job having deposed Catholic King James II – a keystone event for northern loyalists. Before we’ve even turned a pedal, a jovial middle-aged man on a folding e-bike stops for a chat about the adventures he and his mates have enjoyed lately. It’s the kind of freewheeling, unrushed encounter you rarely have in southern England. But we must be getting on, for the sky is beginning to bruise.

All the presidents’ glen

Sure enough, within a few minutes it’s spitting with rain and we briefly take shelter inside the cottage where the parents of the seventh US president Andrew Jackson had lived before emigrating to the Carolinas in 1765. The cottage is now a museum that perhaps not surprisingly emphasises Jackson’s political nous while downplaying his penchant for ethnic cleansing. You have to wonder if bullishness is in the blood around here when you learn that Jackson was the first of at least 15 US presidents with Scots-Irish heritage – from Jackson right through to Barack Obama. Stepping back outside, the drizzle has set in, washing out the views, so we resolve to get closer to the scenery with a cliffside clamber.

The Gobbins is a cliff-face along the eastern coast of the Islandmagee peninsula about 10 miles north of Carrickfergus. It’s raining steadily by the time we arrive, so we dive into the visitor centre for a coffee and traybake (this region’s sweet treats are unapologetically indulgent). Before we twig why, we’re being kitted out in sturdy boots and hard hats, before being introduced to our tour guide Jim and loaded into a minibus. The trek begins a short drive away, on a craggy path that was chiselled from the cliff-face at the turn of the 20th century. Jim is a superb guide who in short, animated bursts explains how the white-knuckle path, with its two miles of steps, tunnels and bridges, was the labour of love of railway engineer Berkeley Deane Wise. As we scramble along this most improbable tourist trail – as bonkers as it is beautiful – I can’t help wondering at Wise’s fervent quest to tame nature and open to visitors a place otherwise only accessible to gulls, kittiwakes and puffins.

This must be the place

Back in the minibus, I get chatting to the driver, Paula, who tells me she has lived here for 40 years. “I’m from the Isle of Wight originally but I came here on my bike in 1984. I thought it was better here,” she says matter-of-factly, “so I stayed.” Visiting here as a lone female cyclist in those troubled times – the same year as the Brighton bombing – and falling in love with the place seems uncannily similar to Dervla Murphy’s experience. Too many questions flood my mind, so I mumble something vague about how she must have seen a lot of changes here. She grins at me with a sympathetic expression that says: look around you, what’s not to love?

We’re getting used to the rain by now and it’s not cold so we do a loop of the peninsula before picking up the Antrim coast road. Like the Gobbins path on a giant scale, the coast road is a feat of engineering that seems to defy logic. Rather than connecting the towns of villages of the glens with inland roads, civil engineer William Bald proposed to carve out a route along the base of the cliffs for nearly 40 miles, from Larne to Ballycastle. Between 1832 and 1842, he did just that by blasting away tens of thousands of cubic metres of rock, clearing a spectacular route along the shoreline. Just north of Larne, we pedal past a roadside memorial paying homage to the “men of the Glynnes” who chipped away until the coast was cleared. As the road twists and turns, the hue of the rock shifts from light limestone to red sandstone to black basalt – the latter forming a stunning natural 5km-to-go gantry as we pass beneath The Black Arch for our first-day finale to the Ballygally hotel.

Hammered by Torr head