Episode 1 Shaping the Coast

The Antrim Coast Road - an unrivalled feat of engineering

that defines not only the geography of Northeast Ulster,

but its people.

The locals here do say if you are stopping and you want

to give someone a lift, they do say, instead of saying,

"Do you want a lift?" a lot of people would say,

"Do you want a sail?"

Historically, the people of the remote west of Scotland and parts

of East Antrim effectively lived as one community.

Known as Dalriada, the inhabitants of this ancient kingdom

depended on the sea for travel, trade, communication and food.

The people of the Glens of Antrim

and the people of the Mull of Kintyre just over there,

they're basically the same people.

It's not as if the Irish moved to Scotland or the Scottish moved

to Ireland - we were, and in many ways are, the same people.

Then, in 1832, a remarkable Scotsman changed everything.

He just fits the character of a Scot.

At the time, a man of parts, a man of "pairts", as we say.

William Bald was a prodigious talent. A skilled cartographer,

he mapped the Western Isles of Scotland at 16.

His career progressed to engineering,

building bridges, harbours and roads.

However, it was along the quiet shores of County Antrim

that he would produce his masterpiece.

William was commissioned to build a road for the people of the Glens

and help provide access to this place apart.

Other engineers proposed complex bridges and structures to tackle

access into the Glens, but William looked to the coast.

It must have been a huge job, even to design the new road.

And a community so heavily reliant on the sea changed forever.

Long before the Antrim Coast Road was conceived,

the communities of the Glens of Antrim

and the western regions of Scotland lived as one.

The kingdom of Dalriada, as it was known,

flourished from the third century AD.

It stretched from the mouth of the River Bush

to Glynn, just south of Larne in Antrim,

to Kintyre, the Western Isles and parts of Argyll in Scotland.

There always has been a lot of contact between this part of Ireland

and the West of Scotland,

and that's naturally, simply because of the close distance.

And in fact, Scotland gets its name from the Scoti, which were a tribe

from this area, and they were the people who settled in Argyll,

and they eventually became Dalriada,

and that eventually became the Kingdom of Scotland.

North Antrim, for example,

is bounded by mountains

on the landward side.

And Argyll in Scotland is bounded by mountains on the landward side.

And it was extremely difficult to traverse those mountains.

In Scotland, it would take at least three days on horseback

to get to the other side of the Grampian Mountains.

So the sea was the highway -

it was by sea that people connected with each other.

If you go out into the middle of the sea there,

you discover that you're surrounded, if you like, by bits of land.

You look at the horizon, there's this ever-changing necklace

of islands and headlands and mountains all around you.

And that was, if you like, the community.

WOMAN RECITES:

This maritime kingdom evolved over centuries,

as various rebellions and invasions

changed the nature of rule.

However, in the 12th century, a great warlord

gave chase to the Norsemen and became King of the Isles.

His descendants went on to become the Lords of the Isles

and to make their presence felt on both sides of the Irish Sea.

The southern Hebrides in Scotland,

a dynasty appeared as the Viking influence began to wane.

It was a kind of Gaelicised Viking dynasty,

led by a man called Somerled.

And he was the ancestor of the McDonnells.

That was really the golden period of Dalriada,

that's the time of the Lord of the Isles.

And the McDonnells were the premier family,

both in the West of Scotland and over here.

In those days, and we're talking really between

about the 12th century up to the 17th century,

this area was very significant.

I always find it fascinating that this area, if you look at the maps,

the Glens and the West of Scotland look remote,

but if you turn the British Isles on their side,

you suddenly find that we are in the middle of the United Kingdom,

in the middle of Great Britain,

so Northern Ireland actually isn't on the outskirts,

it's right in the middle of this major, major route.

This highway across the narrow sea between East Antrim and Scotland

allowed the people to travel back and forth.

As centuries passed and the industrial age dawned,

new methods of travel and communication became essential.

In 1831, an Office of Public Works was established

to improve access into remote areas in Ireland.

One place in particular came under scrutiny -

the settlements and villages along the East Coast of Antrim,

cut off from one another and the rest of the country

by the mighty glens.

One of the most prolific engineers of the time was a Scot

called William Bald, and in 1832,

he embarked on an amazing journey

to build a road that would open up the Glens

and ultimately change the face of this area forever.

Visiting Northern Ireland for the first time, Andrea Bald

and her son Levi have travelled over 11,000 miles from New Zealand

to experience the legacy of their pioneering ancestor.

With a keen interest in her family history,

Andrea is determined to discover all she can

about her great-great-great grandfather, William Bald.

13, 14 years ago, my dad started researching.

He'd been told by his father

something about, "My grandad built the Antrim Coast Road."

But Dad didn't know his name or anything,

and so Dad started looking into it and he went,

"Ah! My father wasn't telling porkies, it's true!"

I was looking at some notes recently and I'd written that

my father's grandfather was a civil engineer, and by that time,

I'd done an engineering degree and so I wrote, "Civil engineer, wow!"

And so then finding out the connection back to William,

it was just remarkable, it was like...

And Dad goes, "There must be an engineering gene or something."

With engineering in her blood,

Andrea has a special appreciation for William's achievements.

Look.

-What is that?

-That's a...

I don't think you'd call it a tunnel. An arch?

But very little of William's story is known,

and Andrea is keen to connect with anyone

who can help her discover more about her ancestor.

He's described sometimes as being quite impetuous, but other times

as being very cultured and knowledgeable

and generous with his knowledge and things like that.

And that starts to bring to life

what he must have been like as a person.

So, yeah, a huge sense of pride, really.

This is the Antrim Coast Road, and we're on it!

Oh, my goodness! Yeah! Just amazing.

Look, so, see up there, how steep that is,

so you just wouldn't have been able to get around here.

Andrea is in Glenarm to have a chat with local historian Iain Bradley,

who is particularly interested in how and why

the coast road came to be built.

There are some people say it was built as a military road,

because after the 1798 rising, they felt they had to subdue the Irish,

the same as they'd done in Scotland after the '45 rising.

-Yes.

-They built the military roads in Scotland.

But they built them immediately after '45 in Scotland.

Here, this was 30 years later,

so I don't believe it was built as a military road.

-I think it was just for commerce.

-But there's no records of

calls for it to be built or anything like that?

Well, there was always people looking for it to be built.

The local villagers

would have complained about how difficult it was.

It was really quite notorious from this bit on,

there was a very, very steep path here. One in four of a gradient.

-Trying to get up that with a horse and cart...

-Yeah.

And it wasn't tarmacked. It would be loose stones.

And maybe the rain coming down, the muck coming down,

it really was not very nice.

The fact that the Earls of Antrim lived in Glenarm

and they have a castle there would have influenced things.

-Right. Made it a bit more important.

-Yes.

The Earl of Antrim would have a lot of influence in the building

-of the road, or getting the money for that.

-Yep.

To me, given that the coast wasn't accessible, but this road was,

it must've been a huge job even to design the new road,

because how would you get to the bits

that you needed to design around?

Yes, it would've been quite difficult. I don't know if they

came in by boat or just scrambled up over the rock faces and that.

Parts of the road were very simple to build.

-Because they were already flat.

-Yes.

But then there were headlands and they had to blast the rocks.

There was a lot of blasting, and of course, the gunpowder they used

-in those days was not as effective as nowadays.

-No.

It wasn't as stable and there was a lot of problems, I'm sure.

Other places, there was sliding clay, a sort of blue, heavy clay,

almost like cement, that was always wet and it was always sliding down.

And it's sliding to this day.

As I understand it, the road was done in a series of places,

because they've done bits and then the idea was to join them all up.

And of course there were certain places were very hard to join up.

-Yes.

-And of course, that's where his expertise would have come in.

-Yes.

But what's really struck me in the last couple of days

is that there is a bunch of people up here

that know all about William Bald, much more than we ever have!

-"Hang on a minute!"

-He had a great influence on us,

because he opened up the Glens completely.

The Antrim Coast Road allowed new settlers

to make their homes in the Glens of Antrim,

an area which for centuries had been dominated by native Irish

and descendants of the clans of Dalriada.

From the late Middle Ages, local Gaelic lords

had employed Gall Og Liagh,

which literally means "young foreign warriors",

later anglicised as gallowglasses.

These mercenary soldiers often settled in Ireland

and their names can still be found to this day.

One of the greatest of these clans is the McDonnells,

the former Lords of the Isles,

who became the Earls of Antrim in the 17th century.

Today, they still live in their ancestral home, Glenarm Castle.

Hector McDonnell, brother of the present Earl of Antrim,

is an acclaimed realist painter.

Hector is fascinated by his family's legacy.

My historical interest is really

entirely the result of my parents being enormous storytellers.

I just was brought up to sort of be intoxicated by these tales.

And I remember my tutor at Oxford looked at me rather sadly and said,

"The one thing I would advise you, is when it comes to your exams,

"don't answer any Irish questions."

There was too much wonderful fiction in my head

for anything I wrote on that subject to be of any value whatsoever.

Well, there are all sorts of curious legacies of the McDonnell clan here.

I mean, apart from the fact

that there are an awful lot of McDonnells about the place,

there are also all these families

which we brought in by one means or another.

I mean, like these people from the Western Isles who came in

in the 16th century, like the McAllisters and McNeills

and other families like that.

The nature of the peopling of the Glens

owes an enormous amount to my family.

Also, because they survived as a family in the 17th century,

that they knew how to stay on the ground

and keep things going, which is an extreme achievement.

It meant that the population was never moved off,

it meant that the people who were here stayed here.

And that was an enormous achievement -

unlike many places in the North of Ireland,

where there has been disruption

through one lot of people being kicked out and other people going,

that does not seem to have happened here.

The descendants of these early clans

and mercenary warriors are proud of their colourful history.

And that close sense of kinship and community continues to this day.

There were little ports all round the coastline here

and I suppose the people used them for their own communities.

The locals here do say, if you are stopping and you want

to give somebody a lift, they do say, instead of saying,

"Do you want a lift?"

a lot of people would say, "Do you want a sail?"

And that goes back to those times and those days,

that everybody was rowing about in their little boat, or sailing about.

That's the Mull of Kintyre that we can see there,

so you are only about 17 miles from the Mull of Kintyre here.

But, yeah, a good day, you can see right down into Argyll

and you can see right up there into Islay,

the Inner Hebrides, if it's a north wind blowing and it's a clear day.

An awful lot of the people here are of Scottish descent.

We are McAllisters and we are originally

from a place called the Loop in Scotland.

So we're not really originally Irish, as such,

although we've been here for hundreds of years.

You have a lot of McDonnells in Glenariff,

and they originally came from Scotland as well.

They came over here to try and throw the McQuillans off the Crown.

We came over to help them as, I suppose, warriors,

or whatever you called people back in those days.

I think I would like a younger generation to grow up here,

but it's very hard to get houses here.

Houses here are very expensive.

And that's the difficult task. If I could get somewhere to build a house

or buy something like that round here, close to here,

you probably would, yeah.

But land in the Glens is very expensive, as are houses.

Because, I suppose, it's so scenic and it looks nice

and people like to come for their holidays,

so then you get people with a lot of money

coming out of places like Belfast etc, snapping up the houses

and then it leaves it more difficult for the local person.

There have been McAuleys in the Glens pretty well for as long as

there have been people in them.

It's probably the most common and popular name in the Glens,

but it goes back into pretty well prehistory.

They did do a bit of DNA testing

and they are all from pretty well the same DNA base.

And McAuleys in Scotland also share the same DNA.

I wouldn't differentiate between Scots and Irish here at all -

they're the same people on either side of the Sea of Moyle.

The same clans, they intermarried,

and they toed and froed all the time.

One thing about farming is it saves a lot on gym fees.

You get quite a bit of exercise.

It's funny the way you say the McAuleys come from Scotland.

The clans here anyway, the Scoti, went across and established

the Kingdom of Dalriada here in the Glens

and in the Western Isles of Scotland.

And they brought the language over with them - Gay-lic or Gah-lic,

they're just dialects of one another.

The Gaelic supplanted the previous language in Scotland,

which was Pictish. Which was probably a Celtic language

similar to what is now Welsh or Cornish or Breton in France.

There's P-Celtic and Q-Celtic.

Gaelic is Q-Celtic and Welsh is P-Celtic.

Essentially, the word for "head" in Gaelic

is "ceann", which is a Q sound,

and in Welsh, it is "pen",

so that's why they call one P-Celtic and the other Q.

But before the coast road, travel between the Glens

and the Western Islands and the West of Scotland was all by boat.

The Sea of Moyle was how we travelled around.

# I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold

# We'd fire no guns, shed no tears

# Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier

# The last of Barrett's Privateers

# So here I lay in me 23rd year

# I wish I was in Sherbrooke now

# It's been six years since we sailed away

# And I just made Halifax yesterday

# God damn them all

# I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold

# We'd fire no guns, shed no tears

# I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier

# The last of Barrett's Privateers

# God damn them all

# I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold

# We'd fire no guns, shed no tears

# I'm a broken man on a Halifax pi-i-ier

# The last of Barrett's Privateers. #

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

This is the Meeting House at Cairncastle, in Mattie Moore's Pub.

I've been coming here since I was 17, playing music, of and on.

So there's been a session here for nearly four decades, that I know of.

Maybe earlier, I don't know, but certainly there's been pub music

going on here for 40 years.

We hear a lot of talk about the Ulster Scots tradition, but, I mean,

long before Ulster Scots was ever sort of mentioned, in this pub,

I heard lots of Scottish songs and Irish songs,

there was a mixture of everything.

But I guess with the technological age, the internet and so on,

you can get anything here.

We play a selection of all kinds of genres of music.

I think it's fair to say we're all just music lovers

and we don't like to pigeonhole anything, you know?

WOMAN RECITES:

Iain Bradley has a keen interest in genealogy and has discovered

that his ancestors are of both Irish and Scottish descent.

The narrow sea linked the two areas,

with people travelling over and back on a daily basis.

The first of my family that came to Glenarm

would have been here just about the time of the famine,

probably at the height of the famine.

There was a Sarah Hunter, she had been born in Scotland

in a place called St Quivox, just outside Ayr.

And her father was Irish, from Ballycarry.

By the 1840s, the time of the famine,

she was appointed as a sewing agent in Glenarm.

Family tradition here has it that Lady Antrim was instrumental

in bringing my great-great- grandmother here to Glenarm.

She wanted an industry for her tenants.

A sewing agent was a person who was involved in the flowering trade,

as it was called.

Flowering was a process that was developed in Ayrshire in the 1820s.

It involved satin thread being woven onto white muslin,

and the muslin was already marked out with a blue dye.

And it was given out to these girls and young women

and they did this embroidery.

It would be the only work, really,

for young girls in the village at that time.

And the girls were as young as 11 and usually up to about 22.

There's over 50 girls from the village employed,

according to the 1851 Census, in that work.

Andrea Bald is starting to realise

the impact that William's road has had.

-A lot of fresh blood would have come in. Fresh families.

-Yep.

For different reasons, you know. Obviously, in the 1830s,

when the road was built, you were getting, the police force

was set up in Ireland, so the police

would be moved in from other counties.

And the schools started, the National School system,

and there would be teachers moving in,

so you had this intermingling, which was good.

-You'd a lot of fresh blood, fresh ideas and fresh families.

-Mmm. Mmm.

Of course, the coast road was very important to our family,

because that's how we came to the Glens.

-Yes.

-My ancestors came in from County Down and from Scotland.

And they landed in Ballycarry and then moved up the way.

They came up through Larne and then onto Glenarm.

And I wonder if they'd ever have managed it

if they'd had to come over this hill!

I guess I... I knew

about the enormity of the difficulty of making the road,

but hearing it from a local,

it's not just knowing, it's like,

wow, feeling the enormity of the difficulty.

And the other thing is, the real sense of how important it is

to the community, how it's not just a convenient road,

it really changed the lives of the community here,

I think is really what struck me.

It's lambing season for Carnlough farmer Charlie McAuley.

With the year-round pressures of running a farm,

community support is vitally important.

I do need help, but most of the farmers round here...

..keep in touch with mobile phone and if you need help,

you just ring some of my neighbours

and they'll come down and help me.

It's always actually been the same, even back in the old days

when you were making hay, everybody bailed in to help everyone else.

I suppose it's part of what makes the country the country.

Everyone can pretty well turn their hand to pretty well anything.

You have to be able to do a bit of everything.

And it's good to get off and help someone else anyway,

and have a bit of a yarn and socialise.

We spend a lot of time drinking tea.

MUSIC PLAYS

-WOMAN:

-Swing!

Ladies in!

This is our regular set dancing night, we have it on a Thursday,

from the beginning of October

until about the end of April,

beginning of May.

So it's not a class, we just meet

and dance and have a chat and catch up with people.

And have a few drinky poos and nibbles.

We've been running for about... Since about 2000.

The upstairs in the pub that we used to go to,

it was turned into a restaurant,

so we had to get another venue and we decided we'd do it in the house.

Mind you, we used to go round the houses earlier,

maybe about 20 years ago, but then that kind of dropped out of use.

So we're just going back to what we were.

Swing your own!

We enjoy it, we like having our friends in

and it's more for the social gathering and the yarn,

and the drinks. The dancing's good, I think, exercise too,

and it's a good excuse for a meeting up.

It's a way of connecting with people.

Out of dancing and meeting together here, you make contacts

and then you make strong friendships.

And people enjoy it.

And I think they seemed to enjoy it more when it's here in the house

rather than when we had it in a room in a pub.

House!

APPLAUSE

Life for the communities of the Glens has changed.

And William Bald's road was certainly a catalyst.

But with no heavy machinery

and very few resources, how was it built?

It's quite mind-boggling,

how these men and the engineers,

William Bald and his colleagues,

how they even dreamt up this idea

of putting the road here in the first place.