One second I was climbing mossy rocks to get a better view of Giant's Causeway, a spectacular geological freak on Northern Ireland's coast where nature has neatly lined up some 40,000 perfectly cylindrical basalt columns in an eerie scene -- the tops of the columns are so regularly placed that legend says the giant Finn McCool built them to be stepping-stones so he could stroll across the sea to Scotland. Then in the next second I lost my footing and was sliding, fast and hard, directly towards the white-capped Atlantic. Bouncing from rock to rock, I watched the waves crashing into the rocky coast and I said a prayer to my Northern Irish ancestors -- and it was answered as I succeeded in digging my finger nails into the moss, enough at least to stop my plummet.

I sat there on the wet rocks, just a few feet from the Atlantic Ocean and with pain shooting through my bruised rear, and I asked myself why I yet again found myself in Northern Ireland. For 25 years the place has been on the no-go list for virtually all tourists, yet five times in the last seven years I have gone to Northern Ireland. Originally I went to track down my grandfather's birth place and of course I crossed the border with trepidation. But in looking for a wee patch of ancestral farmland near the small town of Moneymore, my fears soon evaporated as I explored the rugged sparseness that is Northern Ireland. It is a land filled with ancient stone circles, crumbling castles, even St. Patrick's grave -- and with each one that I have seen, I've had the odd pleasure of knowing that few other tourists have seen them before me because this is a place they just do not go to.

For good reasons, right? Not really. Northern Ireland never has been a Bosnia or Lebanon. "The Troubles" (as the Irish call the multi-party civil war that pits Catholics against Protestants and also against the British) have been largely limited to specific dots on the map -- Belfast, south Armagh, Derry City and, lately, London, where the big Irish Republican Army bombs have been detonated during this decade. TV images of Northern Ireland depict a besooted, red brick, Victorian place -- and so the cities are. But the vast bulk of the six counties of Northern Ireland are rural, and there is no non-political violent crime in the province. I have felt fear, often, on the streets of Los Angeles but I have never been afraid in Northern Ireland.

But I have been startled, many times. Picture this: I had been driving for hours and I was stiff with exhaustion. The thin country paths that often seem to be reserved for sheep and not cars, the driving on the left, the indecipherable road signs had joined to tire me. So I pulled over on a country lane somewhere in County Tyrone and got out of the car to stretch. Behind me I heard a clattering in the bushes. Armed rebels? A British patrol? I froze in place trying to decide my safest move -- when a fox scooted out from the brush. It is so small -- not much bigger than a large house cat. He came up to me, stopped briefly for a look, and I was just stunned by the rareness of this moment. Finally, leisurely, the fox made his way into the distance -- and, again, I knew why I keep going back to Northern Ireland.

It is a land filled with special places. Like Dunluce Castle, a sprawling wreck of a 17th century stone mansion that perches on the Antrim Coast just a few miles west of Giant's Causeway. It was built by the MacDonnell clan and it was built to be impregnable -- made of thick stone, Dunluce sits high on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. When Randal MacDonnell moved in with his wife, Catherine Meadows, in 1635, they took over this gigantic home -- one with dozens of rooms, ample quarters for servants, even a terraced garden. But Catherine never liked the place -- she hated the sound of the sea as it constantly beat into the rocks below Dunluce. Perhaps she was prescient because one night in 1639 the castle's kitchen court just broke away from the main structure and fell one- hundred feet into the Atlantic. That was that for the Catherine. She left Dunluce, the collapsed wall was never repaired, and centuries later what remains of the magnificent castle is there to be visited by all -- but twice I have roamed through the stone rooms of Dunluce Castle as the only visitor and that is a magical sensation.

By now I know the answer when I ask staff at tourist attractions how business is. "We just don't get many tourists, not many at all," said a woman who operated the gift shop at Down Cathedral in Downpatrick, an immaculate church in a sleepy town where legend says St. Patrick is buried. There is a delicious irony in this legend. St. Patrick of course brought Catholicism to Ireland and is Ireland's patron saint -- but he is buried in Northern Ireland, in the graveyard of a Church of Ireland (that is, Protestant) cathedral. But thoughts of "the Troubles" were far from my mind as I looked at the resting place not only for St. Patrick but also for Ireland's other chief saints, Brigid and Columcille. Are they in fact buried here? As far back as 1200, the tradition had already taken hold and an old couplet proclaims it to be so -- "In Down, three saints one grave do fill/Patrick, Brigid, and Columcille." I do not know if the couplet is factual (historians argue the point), but I am glad I saw this simple stone which is adorned with a small wooden cross and a wreath of plastic flowers.

"It's so odd, Americans staying away from here because they think Northern Ireland is too dangerous," said the woman at the gift shop. "Last year a boy in our congregation won a scholarship to study saxophone in New Orleans. He was only there a few days when he got shot."

"But," she turned brighter, "he's home and doing well now." Then she smiled: "And I'm glad you came from America to see us today."

Roots

A confession I need to make: Despite my many trips to Northern Ireland, I still haven't found my grandfather's birthplace. Partly it's because the records are sketchy for dirt-poor farming families like my grandfather's, but in many ways it's because whenever I am in Northern Ireland I find new places to explore. Like the Ulster-American Folk Park, a 60-acre outdoor museum that's a few miles west of Omagh in County Tyrone. American money built this place -- Mellon family money to be precise. In 1818 Thomas Mellon -- aged six -- set sail with his parents to settle in Pennsylvania where he and his children soon amassed a vast banking fortune. In the 1960s, the Mellons heard about efforts to preserve Thomas' homestead -- which, remarkably, remained largely intact. One thing led to another and soon the Mellons were committed not just to preserving their granddad's home, but to helping to create a park designed to show living conditions in the 19th century.

It was a bitter cold day -- aggravated by a stiff, numbing wind -- when I set out on the walk through the park. The first stop -- a cottage of the type lived in by impoverished 19th century Irish farmers. It is one small room, no bigger than a one-car garage. A peat fire burned inside, filling the air with smoke, but the temperature stayed cold -- I could see my breath. I noticed a bed and decided to climb in it. It was barely 6'2" and profoundly uncomfortable. I pulled off the coverings for a closer look. The bed turned out to be little better than a wooden ladder with a thinly stuffed burlap sack serving as the mattress.

Down a path is the Mellon cottage -- just four small rooms and the Mellons were said to be prosperous by local standards, although nobody got truly prosperous working the small farms that dotted Northern Ireland in the 1800s and are still there today, worked by farmers determined to earn their keep on a patch of rocky land. These farming roots are plain at the Mellon cottage: Chickens noisily patrolled the grounds and had to be shooed out of the living room.

I walked through several more cottages -- all authentic artifacts from the period or painstaking constructed to be indistinguishable from the original homes, all humble -- and fell into talking with a guide. "It was a terribly hard life," she said to me. "Do you know the trip across the water to America cost three pounds? And the annual earnings of a 19th century farmer were about 12 pounds. The voyage lasted six to eight weeks. Many died aboard ship. But still they sailed to America," the guide told me.

So I may not have found my ancestral farm, but at the Ulster-American Folk Park, I found the next best thing -- a visible answer to why my grandfather left.

On The Road

A drawback to being the rare tourist is that, in many ways, Northern Ireland hasn't taken the basic steps to accommodate visitors. For instance, no trip in Northern Ireland is a simple matter of going from "A" to "B." It may look that way on the map, but it rarely happens. Signage pointing to monuments often is non-existent or, worse, contradictory. In County Down, for instance, I spotted a sign that purported to show the way to the Legananny Dolmen, a Stone Age burial structure created some 4000 years ago. Legananny is the most depicted Irish dolmen -- its three upright stones that suspend a fourth high in the air show up often in ad campaigns and tourist brochures. So I set off to follow the trail which took me down yet another of Northern Ireland's impossibly narrow country lanes -- barely wider than one car but marked as a two-lane road nonetheless. There was no other traffic, though, so the drive was a pleasant meander through farmlands -- until I came to a fork and there was no sign showing the way to go to the dolmen. Would it be left or right? I headed left -- until, many miles later, I realized that was the wrong choice. I retraced my route to the fork, headed to the right, and a few miles later (after stopping twice for sheep), I saw a sign, "Legananny Dolmen," with an arrow that seemed to point up a farmer's dirt road. Impossible? Not in Northern Ireland. I gingerly threaded the car up the dirt road -- avoiding deep mud holes -- until, there it was, just a few feet from a farmer's garage! There is no fencing, just a wee sign proclaiming that this is Legannany Dolmen. I parked the car directly next to it and got out for a walk amidst rocks, mud, manure, and a celebrated Neolithic monument.

In Northern Ireland I have so often encountered this same scenario -- incomplete, confusing directions -- that finally I have understood that the pursuit is half the adventure. Certainly that proved to be so when I set out in search of the Beaghmore stone circle in rural County Tyrone. A Bronze Age monument of hazy purpose -- fact is, nobody has a clue why these ancient folk took the considerable trouble involved in erecting these circles of stone some 4000 years ago -- Beaghmore is up the road from Drum Manor which in turn is a few miles from Cookstown, a town of 7700 in the middle of rural Tyrone. As always, the directions looked clear on a map -- but on the country lanes, wrong turns seem inevitable, at least for me. But no turn in exactly wrong in Northern Ireland because, during this drive through Tyrone's bleak landscape, I saw another fox, innumerable sheep, busy crows scavenging for food on a frosty day, a few cows, and not another car, not even a farmer on a tractor.

And when I found Beaghmore, I was grateful to be alone -- with seven stone circles. I walked among them, in them, over them, and saw the puzzle archeologists still ponder. Six of the circles are neatly paired, but the seventh sits alone. Why? What happened in these circles? Nobody knows, but that is fine because now I, too, have walked straight into the middle of the mystery.

Bird Calls

It was my last Sunday in Northern Ireland, I was in Belfast, and hadn't a clue how to fill the day. I am not fond of Northern Ireland's capital -- it's a charmless relic of the Industrial Revolution and it is there that I have seen the casualties of the civil war. Head into west Belfast -- the Catholic Falls Road area and the Protestant Shankill Road -- and everywhere there are martial wall murals as well as the many walking wounded, the people who have been crippled by the fighting that sometimes flares up in west Belfast. The two neighborhoods sit cheek-by-jowl against each other and, some years ago, despairing of the continuous battling between the faiths, the British erected a "peace wall" -- giant fencing that sealed off most of the streets that connected the adjacent communities. On my past trips, I have walked the streets of west Belfast, I have sat one-on-one for an hour with Gerry Adams, the IRA's main spokesman, and I have talked with his opposite numbers among the Protestants and the British. I do not trivialize the differences that divide the sides -- but I did not want Belfast's bitter sectarianism to be my last memory of Northern Ireland. So I climbed into my car and headed away from the city, towards the rural back country of Northern Ireland that I have come to love as much as I hate the violent anger that percolates in Belfast.

I had no plan, but soon I spotted a sign -- "Castle Espie" it read and pointed down a road. Why not look at another castle, I decided, and headed towards it.

But when I got there I discovered Castle Espie in fact is not a castle at all but a sanctuary for migratory birds who spend part of every year in the wetlands near Strangford Lough in County Down. This is a place just 10 miles from downtown Belfast but it is innumerable miles removed in attitude.

"You'll want to buy some seed to feed the birds," said the woman at the castle's entry. She indicated bags of bird seed at 50 pence (roughly 75 cents). "You're their first visitor this morning. They'll be hungry for breakfast," she added.

I bought two bags and wandered off in search of starving birds. I did not walk far. A few yards into the sanctuary and, suddenly, I saw dozens of ducks, swan, geese climbing out of their pond and heading straight towards me. A trumpeter swan let fly with his raucous call and, as the biggest bird around, littler ones let him lead the parade. Posted signs told me the obvious -- birds cannot bite -- but it was pleasant reassurance nonetheless when I found myself surrounded. I emptied some seed in the palm of my hand and offered it to the swan. He ducked his open bill towards it, gently striking my hand and sucking some seeds into his mouth -- but mainly scattering them on the ground where wise little birds already had made themselves ready to grab the strays.

The scene repeated itself dozens of times that morning until I came upon a whooper swan that would not come out of the water at all. Plainly filled with fear, he stayed put in a pond and he hissed at me, a sound some birds make when gripped with terror. No other birds were afraid. What was this swan's problem?

I started to walk away but decided to give this bird one more try, so I pivoted towards him and got another view. And I understood his fear. His right wing was a pitiful, mangled mess of twisted bone fragments and tattered feathers. I threw him several handfuls of seed, then made my way back to the entry. "Many of our birds live here permanently. They're injured by hunters, sometimes by power lines. Once they get here, they're safe," the woman at the entry told me and she explained that Castle Espie provided first-aid to maimed birds and also fed them when seed-dispensing visitors were few. "Isn't it amazing? A place like this in Northern Ireland," she added.

But it doesn't amaze me anymore. That's because, in Northern Ireland, I have grown accustomed to being amazed -- and consistently delighted.

Copyright 1999 by Robert McGarvey. 

This article originally appeared in Westways Magazine.