Here’s something the fans don’t always realise until they arrive: a huge amount of Game of Thrones was filmed within an hour or two of Belfast. Westeros, it turns out, is the size of a small Irish county — and you can walk a good deal of it in a week.
Winterfell is a real place
Castle Ward, an eighteenth-century estate in County Down, stood in for the Stark family seat at Winterfell. You can stand in the courtyard where Bran climbed the walls, then wander into Tollymore Forest next door — the Haunted Forest of the very first episode, where the direwolf pups were found.
The Kingsroad has a postcode
The avenue of gnarled, intertwining beech trees known as the Dark Hedges is the most photographed road in Northern Ireland, and for good reason — it’s the Kingsroad, the one Arya rode down disguised as a boy. Get there early; the light through those branches at dawn is worth the alarm clock.
Caves, coves, and a born shadow
At Cushendun, on the Antrim coast, a set of 400-million-year-old caves is where Melisandre gave birth to that shadow (you remember the one). A few miles on, Carnlough Harbour is where Arya hauled herself, bleeding, out of the canals of Braavos. The whole Causeway Coast doubles as half the Seven Kingdoms.
More than a film set
What makes it special isn’t just the locations — it’s that they were always spectacular. Long before the cameras came, the Glens of Antrim, the basalt of the Giant’s Causeway and the ruins of Dunluce Castle were some of the most dramatic scenery in these islands. The show simply gave the rest of the world a reason to look.
We’ll walk you through the lot — and finish, of course, with a proper pint somewhere the cast used to drink.
— Mike Healy, Celtic RnR Tours
