Sheridan, Blackwood, Dufferin
Helen
Helen Selina Sheridan was a granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She married Price Blackwood, the 4th Baron Dufferin and Claneboye, and was widowed at thirty-four. She wrote songs that were sung across Victorian London — 'The Irish Emigrant', 'Terence's Farewell' — and held a salon and was admired and was bright. When she was dying of breast cancer in the 1860s her son Frederick, the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, set about putting her name on the landscape: a tower at Conlig (Tennyson wrote the dedication), a railway station on his estate, the bay it overlooked. She died in 1867. The map remembers.
Ferrey, 1863
A station that thinks it is a castle
Benjamin Ferrey was an English Gothic Revival architect, a pupil of A.C. Pugin, designer of churches and a cathedral or two. The Marquess hired him to build a station at his expense on his own land, and Ferrey produced a small Scottish baronial fantasy in stone — turrets, crow-stepped gables, a private waiting room reserved for the Dufferin household. The platforms are at the foot of a cutting; a stone staircase climbs to a courtyard above; from the courtyard, two laneways lead off — one toward Clandeboye House, the other down to the sand. It is Grade A listed. The building stopped being a station in 1986 and stood derelict for years. It is now a private spa and house. The trains still stop on the platforms below.
Two guns on the Lough
Grey Point Fort
Up on the headland west of the beach sits a coastal battery built between 1904 and 1907 to defend the entrance to Belfast Lough. Two 6-inch Mark VII breech-loading guns commanded the approach; a matching battery on the far side at Kilroot closed the door. The fort was manned through both world wars and stood down in 1956. The guns are still in their emplacements. You can wander through the magazines and the gunners' quarters. The view straight up the Lough is what the gunners had — Belfast at the back of it, the ferry to Cairnryan crossing left to right, and nothing in between.
The chef before the empire
Deane's on the Square
Michael Deane opened a restaurant on the small parade of shops at Helen's Bay Station Square in 1993. He moved the operation to Howard Street in Belfast and the Belfast room won its Michelin star in 1997 — the launchpad for the brasserie-and-fine-dining empire that still bears his name. The Helen's Bay site no longer trades as a restaurant. The square is quieter for it. A pharmacy, a hairdresser, a takeaway or two. The chef moved on.