We flew to visit friends in Belfast over the August Bank Holiday, which made a nice change, though, as is traditional for British Bank Holidays, the weather was a bit gloomy. I suppose I should be grateful that we saw the sun at all and that it didn't pour with rain for the entire holiday. The August Bank Holiday was even changed a few years ago from the start to the end of August in a bid to have better holiday weather, but it doesn't seem to have worked! Scotland kept the original Bank Holiday at the start of August, but I don't believe that was any better.
Because we have visited Belfast many times we've seen all of the more popular tourist attractions, but there was still plenty to do.
We began on the Saturday with a visit to Belfast Castle. The original Belfast Castle, built by the Normans in the 12th century, did not survive. The next one was built of stone and timber in 1611, was burned down about 100 years later. The same family, now called Donegall, decided on the present castle, and it was completed in 1870 in Scottish Baronial style, as you can see.
The castle has a commanding position on the slopes of a hill, with wonderful views down to Belfast Lough.
The castle passed to the family of the Earl of Shaftesbury and that family gifted the castle and the estate to the city of Belfast in 1934. Since then, it has been a popular venue for weddings, dinners, dances and conferences. There was a wedding there on the day of our visit. My friend's brother and I sneaked inside for a look at the room prepared for the wedding breakfast; the room itself was imposing, with a fine decorated plaster ceiling, smart gilt chairs and tables set with white linen and gleaming cutlery and glass. The flowers on the tables were particularly pretty and I'm quite sorry I didn't take a phot but I felt it would be too intrusive.
The ornamental staircase at the front of the castle is popular for wedding photos, so it was difficult to avoid photographing the bride or the guests - at least I managed it without the bride, though not without wedding guests.
There are a 9 cats in the garden, in topiary, mosaic or stone, so visitors delight in seeing if they can find all of them. We did find them all eventually. Below is one of the more obvious ones, in topiary.
We had been fortunate to have a fine sunny day for our first visit. The next day was not so sunny and a little colder. My friend suggested a visit to the SS Nomadic, in the Titanic quarter. Below is a much better view of the titanic building than anything I managed to photograph when I was there two years ago.
SS Nomadic is in a historic dry dock near where she was originally built in 1911.
She was originally built alongside the Titanic, as a tender to take passengers out to the Titanic and its sister ship Olympic from Cherbourg, which was a shallow water port. She was built using the same design and similar luxurious finishes to the Titanic but was exactly one quarter of the size. She did take passengers from Cherbourg to the titanic on its ill-fated first voyage, and thereafter, she and her running mate Traffic ferried passengers, their baggage, mail and ship's supplies to and from large ocean liners moored off-shore.
She saw active service in both World Wars, famously taking part in the troop evacuation from Cherbourg in June 1940. She retired from sailing in 1968, and was converted to a floating restaurant in Paris. When the restaurant went out of business, she would have been scrapped, but was bought instead by the Northern Ireland government and brought back to Belfast where she has been set up in a historic dry dock as a tourist attraction.
We found the visit quite fascinating. You join a tour and see the different parts of the ship, that apportioned to first class passengers and the less luxurious surroundings for the second class passengers. This was the first class bar.
There was also a saloon attached to the First Class Ladies loos, and it shows the high quality of the panelling, not to mention the handsome Edwardian table.
Notice the patterned flooring; second class passengers had plain flooring! I did ask about third class passengers, but didn't really get a satisfactory answer.
We were also able to look at some of the much less salubrious surroundings apportioned to the crew. There's a glass panel so that you can see the perfectly dreadful crawl space that was used by the engineers when tending to parts of the engine. As I suffer increasingly from claustrophobia, I found it difficult even to look at it, never mind contemplating using it.
There are lots of things to do, Edwardian clothes to try on, touch panels giving information and you could spend quite a long time there, we certainly did.
As this is getting a bit long, and I don't think I will be able to post many photos, I'll continue this visit to Belfast in a later post.
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