Northern Ireland | TRAVEL
When a family wedding took us over to Northern Ireland, we booked a long enough stay to do some touring in County Down. Looking for wildlife and historical interest for our explorations, we decided to circumnavigate Strangford Lough, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that is one of most biodiverse regions in Europe.
The inland sea of Strangford Lough is about 16 miles long and four miles wide, with a very narrow entrance from the Irish Sea in the southeast. The place transforms with each tide. When the sea retreats, acres of shining mudflats are dotted with brown waders and the occasional flash of white from a cattle egret. It is a favoured location for wintering seabirds, with 75% of the entire population of light-bellied brent geese migrating here from Arctic Canada.
From our base in Newtownards, we visited the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust's Castle Espie reserve at the northwest corner of the lough. In Victorian times, limestone was quarried here and burnt to create lime for fertilising fields. The remains of a long quay still extends from the lime-burning kiln far out across the mudflats, so that lime could be shipped out regardless of the state of the tide. The entrepreneur who developed the site also built a state-of-the-art brickworks, using clay dug from pits above the shoreline.
The pits and quarries are now filleddabbling ducks.
