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Giants Causeway, Belfast - Private Shore Excursion
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From €1313 per person
This private 11 to 12-hour shore excursion takes you from Dublin Port through some of the most memorable landscapes and stories Northern Ireland has to offer. Your professional guide covers the history and culture at every stop, and you’ll be back at Dublin Port in good time for your departure - just let your guide know your preferred return time, and allow at least 90 minutes to account for any traffic.
The Giant’s Causeway is the centrepiece - over 40,000 hexagonal-shaped basalt pillars formed by cooling lava millions of years ago, though local legend credits an Irish giant who was building a bridge to Scotland to settle a dispute with a Scottish giant. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site ranked alongside Everest and the Giant Redwoods in global geological importance. You have two hours here to walk, explore and take as many photos as you like.
Belfast brings a different kind of story. The Titanic Belfast exhibition is the world’s largest Titanic experience, housed in an iconic six-floor building right beside the historic construction site. Six floors of interpretive and interactive galleries cover the sights, sounds and stories of the ship, the city and the people who built her. Then there’s the complicated and fascinating history of the Troubles (1968-2005), told through the creative murals of Belfast’s Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods - an extraordinary achievement of diplomacy and patience to work through.
Two optional stops can round out the day: Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, where you cross a bridge suspended almost 100 feet above the sea - genuinely worth the adrenaline - and the Dark Hedges, that famous beech tree avenue planted in the 18th century and made world famous as the King’s Road in Game of Thrones (Season 2, Episode 1).
Dunluce Castle is also on the route - a romantic ruin perched on the coastal cliffs of north County Antrim, with its own share of banshee folklore and a dramatic history that includes part of the castle’s kitchens falling into the sea one stormy night in 1639.
At the Giant’s Causeway, the two hours here are well spent if you walk past the main cluster of hexagonal columns and follow the coastal path east - the crowds thin quickly once you’re a few hundred metres from the visitor centre, and the perspectives back along the headland are better. The basalt columns are free to walk on; the visitor centre café and exhibits are the paid part. If the optional Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge is on your list, the entrance fee is around £9 per adult and the bridge takes a few minutes to cross - the real reward is the view of the Antrim coast from the far side.
In Belfast, the Titanic Belfast exhibition is inside an iconic six-floor building on the exact slipway from which the ship was launched on 31 May 1911. Harland & Wolff opened the Queen’s Island yard in 1861 and at peak was building the largest ships on earth. The two massive yellow cranes - Samson and Goliath - still stand over the Lagan and are visible from much of the city. For lunch near the Titanic Quarter, the Lagan waterfront walk is flat and ten minutes takes you to the city centre, where St George’s Market (Friday to Sunday) does local food properly.
Dunluce Castle’s 45 minutes is enough for the headland circuit - archaeologists found a complete planned town from 1608 buried beside the ruins in 2011, including indoor toilets and a grid street plan. The kitchen-falling-into-the-sea story is in the tour notes and is historically attested. The cliff edge on the seaward side of the ruin is unguarded; watch your footing in wet conditions.
The Belfast Neighbourhoods section covers the Falls and Shankill mural circuit. The first peace walls were built here in 1969 and roughly a hundred are still standing - the Good Friday Agreement came in 1998, but the walls did not come down. It is worth asking your guide to walk at least part of the route on foot rather than just viewing from the vehicle; the mural scale and detail reads very differently at street level.
The village of Bushmills sits three kilometres east of the Giant’s Causeway and is the closest settlement of any size to the stones. Dunluce Castle is a short drive further west on the same road. If there’s time between the Causeway and Dunluce, ask your guide to stop in the village - the Bushmills Inn’s Gas Bar is a proper peat-fire snug and the distillery on the River Bush has been licensed since 1608.
If you’re taking the optional Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge stop, it sits on the coast between Bushmills and Ballycastle. Ballycastle itself is the harbour town at the east end of the Causeway Coast, where the ferry leaves for Rathlin Island and the Ould Lammas Fair has been running since a charter in 1606. The coast road drive past Fair Head from Carrick-a-Rede toward Ballycastle is one of the better stretches of road on the whole north coast.