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Private Day Trip from Dublin to Giant's Causeway, Belfast & More
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From €680 per person
A full 11-hour private day trip from Dublin up through Northern Ireland, taking in four very different stops along the way. You travel in a spacious, air-conditioned vehicle with an English-speaking driver and WiFi and bottled water on board. Hotel pickup and drop-off are included.
Belfast starts the day - a city where history and modern culture sit side by side. You can wander its streets or take in landmarks like City Hall. From there, the route heads north to the Dark Hedges, a natural avenue of intertwined beech trees that’s earned a second wave of fame as a filming location for Game of Thrones. It’s genuinely striking in person.
The main event is the Giant’s Causeway - a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the North Antrim coast where around 40,000 hexagonal basalt columns form one of the most unusual landscapes in Europe. The columns were shaped by ancient volcanic activity, and you can walk right down among them. The Visitor Centre is optional and requires a separate entrance fee.
The day finishes at Dunluce Castle, a medieval ruin perched dramatically on sea cliffs above the North Atlantic. The coastal views from here are worth the stop on their own.
Note: This tour crosses into Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. You’ll need a valid passport or national ID.
Make the most of Belfast’s two hours. The city centre is walkable end-to-end in about 25 minutes, so two hours is enough to see City Hall, walk down to the Titanic Quarter waterfront, and take in the fabric of the place. If you want a coffee stop, the Cathedral Quarter has good options in the old bonded warehouses around Hill Street. Belfast has been rebuilding fast since 1998 and the energy in the city is its own attraction.
The Dark Hedges - arrive early or late. The famous beech avenue on Bregagh Road became instantly recognisable after appearing in Game of Thrones, and coach traffic peaks around midday. The early start from Dublin means you should hit it before the worst of the crowds. The trees are genuinely impressive even without the TV context - they were planted in the 18th century by the Stuart family to line the approach to their estate.
At Giant’s Causeway, skip the shuttle bus. The Visitor Centre is at the top of the hill and the columns are at the bottom. There’s a shuttle bus down, but the walk takes about 12 minutes each way and gives you a much better sense of the coastal landscape. The columns are always more striking than photos suggest - get down among them, not just above them.
Dunluce finishes the day well. It’s easy to be tired by the fourth stop on an 11-hour day, but Dunluce Castle deserves 30 minutes of attention. The ruin sits on a sea stack, connected to the mainland by a bridge, with a sheer drop on three sides. The coastal views north and west from the headland are some of the best on the whole Antrim Coast.
Bushmills is three kilometres from the Causeway. The Old Bushmills Distillery holds the oldest licensed whiskey distillery in the world - the royal licence dates to 1608 - and the narrow-gauge Giant’s Causeway and Bushmills Railway runs a heritage tram between the village and the stones if you’d rather arrive on a three-foot gauge than on foot. If there’s any flexibility in timing, the Bushmills Inn Gas Bar has a peat fire and gas lighting that’s been running since the coaching era.