It would be right for those of us who live on the southern side of the Border to be putting out, just now, more positive thoughts about the North and its people. It is a lovely countryside, it has lovely people as well. Kate O'Brien, a Limerick woman as we know, caught something of the Northern character when, in her book My Ireland, she told of passing "the gentle Palladian facade of a small building, which still calmly turns its polite 18th-century face towards the unappealing south flank of the City Hall. Looking in wonder that the quiet little edifice should still be there. And a lady passing said to me, `Go in if you like. I'm sure you'll be very welcome - and they'll give you some nice coffee and cakes'. It was a meeting house of some Christian sect. I thanked the passing lady. I thought it sweet of her, and, as I was to learn - very Belfast. That friendliness in passage, the bright word on the wing - a kind of unheeding grace. Perhaps it is just an expression of energy and love of life." And she goes on to assert that this is a quality which has always enriched and sweetened Belfast writing.
And we should not forget the beauty of parts of the Six Counties which astonishes and delights those who see it for the first time. North Antrim is one example. A remark by Hugh Shearman in his book Ulster (Robert Hale) has been quoted here before: "A powerful, astringent presence seems to brood over a great area of north Antrim . . . when I read that a certain individual, a bishop, claimed to have seen great angels in north Antrim, I did not feel at all inclined to question it."
The coast road, the famous rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede and above all the Giant's Causeway have been so many times written and read of. How many from across the Border have been even once there? A Dublin-published book (1834) with splendid engravings by George Petrie is somewhat disingenuously entitled A Guide to the Giant's Causeway, but in fact covers the whole journey from Belfast around the coast and on to Dunluce, Coleraine, Ballymoney and Lough Neagh. The description of the Causeway itself is stolid enough with the usual tribute to the caves into which tourists may be rowed. And sellers of all kinds of souvenirs were a-plenty.
One of the wares intrigues the writer (unnamed), a substance said to be found in the precipitous cliffs around, and for which no technical name has been found. It resembles cinders and is so called there. It floats on water. Has any visitor since then seen or heard of it? Maybe it was just cinders. Long beaches with almost perpetual rollers are a feature around here. A lovely country and a lovely people. Go and see and meet.