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Picture: Chance and Paxton on Cave Hill, with McArt's Fort behind and Belfast below.

(OK, it's been nearly three months since we did this - it's high time I posted it.)

Our big excursion for the weekend was over to Belfast Castle, and a hike to Cavehill above it. Ginger went with the boys and Evelyn during Evelyn's visit, but that ended up being just to the Castle and its adjoining playground. We did the playground this time too, but the stars aligned and we made it all the way up to the top! I honestly thought we wouldn't make it. The boys typically don't like to hike more than half a mile out, even when there's a destination, and they usually don't do well on rough and hilly terrain. This hike was both - steep, and slippery for a good portion of it.

The brochure map of the park shows the combined Estate and Castle Trails going right by the entrance to the playground, by the Millennium Maze, then splitting off with the Estate Trail going past the caves and on to McArt's Fort. All well and good, but there's lots of well-trodden trails that aren't shown on the map, and most of them aren't marked. I suspect we ended up going well north of the trail we needed, and having to do quite a bit of straight-uphill hiking. We did strike one well-traveled uphill stretch that may have marked the northern-most wall of the Donegall estate. I don't think it was a road since it ran directly up the hill, but there was a long row of trees, equally spaced, and the rocks of a low wall were apparent in their roots. That whole area had a very Lord-of-the-Rings feel to it, with all the tremendous trees, thickets of ivy, sudden openings into glades and fields.

Near the top of this slope we met up with some other hikers who came from even further north (we eventually figured out they came from around the Belfast Zoo car park). As we'd pretty much resigned ourselves to being being totally off the trail, we decided to follow them up - lo and behold, there we are, at the Devil's Punchbowl! Which makes for a fabulous segue into my typical digression for the history and geology of the area.

Cavehill (Belfast City Council says Cave Hill, Wikipedia says Cavehill - who ya gonna believe?) is the most arresting geologic feature of the Belfast area. The whole of the city is bordered to the west by Cavehill and Divis and Black mountains. At the summit, about 1200 feet above sea level, are the neolithic Ballyaghagan Cairn (we didn't find this) and the 11th-century rath McArt's Fort. From below, the promontory the fort sits on is known as Napoleon's Nose, and the subsequent profile of a supine giant was supposedly Jonathan Swift's inspiration for Gulliver's Travels.

There are also five small caves in the escarpment. I haven't been able to find anything about when they might have been made, but the implication that they might have been iron mines seems to indicate Iron Age (500 B.C. to 500 A.D.). Now, I'm not an archeologist or a historian (hey, I'm just a tourist), but only one of those caves is accessible.

Picture: Ginger, Chance, and Paxton on Cave Hill, with Belfast below

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