Episode 2 Shaping the Coast

The Antrim Coast Road,

one of the biggest civil engineering projects

ever undertaken in Ireland.

Innovative in both its design and construction,

this is a road that defines not only the geography of North-East Ulster,

but its people.

This area was once known as Dalriada,

an ancient kingdom that incorporated parts of East Antrim

and the West of Scotland.

The people of the Glens of Antrim and the people of the

Mull of Kintyre, just over there were, 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 o' pairts, as we say.

William Bald, a cartographer and engineer,

was commissioned to build a road in 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 one man's vision would shape an entire community.

Early in the 19th century,

the dangerous mountain pass leading into the Glens of Antrim

were treacherous, particularly in the winter.

The Board of Works conceived a great project to build a new road,

which would give better access for the inhabitants,

open up the Glens for trade and also provide employment.

In the early 1800s,

road-building was a complex and sometimes dangerous undertaking.

And the unique geography of the East Antrim Coast, with its plunging

cliffs, steep gradients and broad U-shaped valleys,

posed a very specific problem.

It would take a special talent to design a solution.

William Bald was one of the leading engineers in Ireland at that time

and the Office of Public Works asked him to come up with a plan.

The challenge facing William was immense.

How could he navigate such protruding headlands,

that daily face to the surging waves of the Irish Sea?

These were significant obstacles to overcome

and the Antrim Coast Road project

would require all of William's skill and ingenuity.

The core strategy of William's pitch,

to blast the cliffs into the sea with explosives,

was a tough sell to a, sometimes cautious, Board of Works.

But his presentation was successful

and William was granted £25,000, to build a road 60km long,

stretching from Larne to Ballycastle.

In 1832, a ten-year project began

that would reshape the landscape and the lives

of the people of the Antrim Coast.

Civil engineer David Orr is an admirer of William's work,

having spent a large part of his career on the Antrim Coast Road.

In the early part of my career I was the maintenance engineer for this

part of County Antrim

and that's really what sparked my interest in the Antrim Coast Road

and the engineer who built it.

William Bald was a Scot.

He was born in 1787, in Burntisland, in Fife,

apprenticed as a map-maker in Edinburgh,

but he came across to Ireland in 1809 to do the survey,

the Ordnance Survey of the County of Mayo, which he did.

But he then became an engineer, as well,

did some work in Drogheda Harbour, the suspension bridge at Kenmare,

and then, he was commissioned for his greatest work,

the Antrim Coast Road.

In the early 1800s, the Irish commissioners recognised

that the Glens of Antrim were very isolated.

They wrote that they were cut-off from any reasonable

communication by the badness of roads over mountains

and steep slopes.

So, the people of the Glens actually found it easier

to trade by boat with Scotland, than to move inland.

So, that was the purpose of the road, it was to open up to Glens,

to give access to the Glens

and to improve the life of the people of the Glens.

I, kind of, think William Bald was an unsung hero.

We've tried to find a portrait of him, without success,

so there's no portrait of him.

And really his only memorial is the Antrim Coast Road and the legacy

that he left to the people of the Glens.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure this morning

to unveil this plaque in recognition of the men of the Glens,

under the direction of William Bald,

and we hope that the many visitors who are coming back

to Northern Ireland will stop and remember

the blood, sweat and tears that were shed

for our convenience in the past.

It's a pleasure to unveil this plaque.

APPLAUSE

It all had to be blasted by gunpowder.

It must have been a terrific job for ten years.

One is appalled at the amount of injuries

and even death that must have occurred

during the construction of this stretch of road.

But how do William's achievements stand up,

when viewed from a modern-day perspective?

Maintenance engineer Clive Robinson oversees the upkeep

of the Antrim Coast Road.

I see my role as just custodian of it.

I'm one of many engineers that will

come and go in this job of mine.

We're custodians of the Coast Road

and we're trying to keep it safe, reliable and enjoyable,

more importantly, for everybody who comes from far and near to use it.

It brings with it a lot of engineering issues,

a lot of interesting engineering challenges.

The road's 170 years old now.

'That's way beyond any of the design life

'that we would build today.

'Normally, if we're building a new structure,

'we'd be looking at, 100 years would be a good return.

'This is 170 and it's stood the test of time.'

We'll just check now on the netting at that basalt layers, to see...

Just above the pillars themselves.

The biggest challenge of this job of mine is trying to maintain the

rock faces, because if we have a lot of freeze thaw in the winter time,

we've more erosion.

If we've had a lot of rainfall, as we have been having all...

Summers, winters, autumns, everything's getting wetter,

it seems, and that gives us big problems

from an engineering perspective.

'Where you have stable slopes,

'which become very unstable and start to slide

'and then you get landmass movements.'

This bit here is fairly sound.

You'll notice that we didn't fit a lot of anchor points in.

You'll see a few there.

There's no great bracing required. Everything there we're happy with.

You know, there's been no major risks posed.

What we would have had here a lot of is...

You see the small chippings coming off the limestone wall?

So, that would be quite typical.

You'd have quite a lot of smaller fragments chipping away.

There's no real threat, other than the fact it's coming down

from the height it's coming down from.

You've got vital damage more than any great risk

to the driver, as such.

But, again, the netting being a fine mesh, that takes care of that,

that holds everything in.

It's quite mind-boggling how these men,

or the men at the time of the Glens,

and the engineers, William Bald and his colleagues,

how they even dreamt up this idea of putting the road here

in the first place.

From an engineering perspective, some of the features you see,

very, very innovative.

Whenever you think... This is the mid-1800s.

We're all very familiar with arches and bridges,

and the strength that an arch gives you.

Anyone in building or engineering will appreciate that.

Well, their solution was to put an inverted arch in,

so the arch goes underneath the road.

And again it was to give it strength from the side, so it would protect

against the weight that was coming on it.

You know, that's fairly innovative.

If you think back to the mid-1800s,

someone dreamt this idea up of inverting the arch.

The limestone blasted by William remained an important

natural resource in East Antrim into the mid-20th century.

The white limestone cliffs at this coast

had been quarried extensively

and much of this product was exported on small, schooner boats

to Scotland.

Although most of the local quarries are now closed,

they gave employment to many,

as Carnlough man John McNeill remembers.

It closed on 26th October 1962.

We walked down the railway

to the office, to get our last pay

and some of them were very downhearted.

Out of the goodness of their hearts,

they were going to give us £2 a year

for every year we worked in it.

Then, they changed their mind the last minute and said

the first five years didn't count.

So, my friend Robert was in it for 37 years

and all he got was £64

for 37 years of work.

I started for 35 shillings a week, which would be £1.75 now.

There was an old man who worked down in the mill,

he started in 1902.

Somebody asked him, "How much did you get whenever you started?"

"Eight pence a day."

Eight pence a day.

That was in 1914, whenever he started.

And here we are with a bit of the limestone.

Very, very important product around the Antrim and the Glens.

It was mostly used and sent to a steel firm in Glasgow.

It is used in the making of steel.

And it was used, I think, in paint -

the manufacturing of paint and putty.

Turned into dust down there in the mill.

Bagged into dust, it was sent away and they used it for that purpose.

There's not much employment here, that's the only thing.

Young people have to travel. There are hardly any employers.

One employer who employs a lot of men and that's it.

The rest are all away somewhere else.

That's not good. That's not good.

That's just as simple as that.

Young people educated and they get away.

It's not so bad now, they're taking more education,

but we didn't in our days.

They're getting a wee chance to do something else, somewhere else.

But that was... That's no just nice.

There's not very much for the young people, that's being quite honest.

There is not.

There was plenty of work in the years from 1832 to '42

when the men of the Glens, under William Bald's supervision,

blasted, quarried, reinforced and built the Coast Road.

William's great-great-great-granddaughter

Andrea Bald, an engineer herself,

has travelled over 11,000 miles from New Zealand to discover more about

this fascinating project.

Just outside Glenarm,

engineering expert David Orr brings

Andrea closer to the detail of her ancestor's achievement.

Was part of the brief to do it along the coast,

or was it just join up these communities however you can?

I think that most people thought that the new road

-would be built inland.

-Yep.

But William was wise enough to realise that,

with the Glens running down to the sea,

that would mean very steep gradients as the road crossed the Glens.

So his big idea was to build it right along

the foreshore and to blast the cliffs.

They then fell down on to the shore and he constructed the road

on that foundation.

And he wrote in his report to the commissioners,

he said that, "30,000 cubic yards of rock

"had been hurled down onto the shore,

"mostly by blasting, which has been executed by skill and judgment."

-Yep.

-So it was a great idea because he didn't need to take stuff out,

-and he didn't need to bring materials in.

-Mm-hm.

-Using the resources of the...

-Using the natural resources.

-Resources of the area.

-Yeah.

And he had a lot riding on it, because there were sceptics.

-Yes, I guess.

-This was his idea to blast the cliff down.

And if it didn't work, it was all on his head, as it were.

Absolutely.

Bald's method was very sustainable

because he brought nothing in.

The road was formed from the material that was blasted down

from the cliffs, and he took nothing out,

so he used the materials that he found along the coast.

And that was the way they had to work in those days because there was

no powered machinery.

They were relying on horses, carts and manpower.

As a civil engineer, and going along the road for many years looking

after it, are there bits where you thought,

"Oh, I wouldn't have done that?" Or are there bits were you thought,

"How on earth did he come up with that?"

-I think just it is the scale of it.

-Yeah.

When you remember they had no mechanical plants,

they really just had the explosives,

horses and carts, and then manpower.

-Do you know how many men?

-We don't know how many men.

We don't even know whether he employed contractors to do the work.

-Right.

-He was definitely the brains of the operation.

-Yeah.

And whether he employed the men directly or whether he employed

contractors, we're not quite sure.

The original estimate for the road was £25,000,

-which doesn't seem very much.

-No, but in those days...

Actually, it ended up costing £37,000,

so the commissioners of Public Works in Ireland weren't too pleased.

But when you think back to the legacy

and the asset that's been left behind,

it was really, really good value.

If you translated that to today's money,

would you be able to get the same road for it?

William's road would have been in the £500-million range.

Which means it wouldn't have happened.

It probably wouldn't have.

Well, it wouldn't have happened today, because this is an

Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

That's right, so it would have actually been more difficult.

You wouldn't have been allowed to have put a road here.

And yet the irony is that the tourists

and the people driving up and down the road are able

to experience the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

because of your

great-great-great-grandfather's work.

William Bald's approach to road building really isn't used today.

For the simple reason that it wouldn't be acceptable,

environmentally, to blast the cliffs in that way.

As we know, it's turned out all right, it's a tourist attraction,

it's an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

But if you try to do something like that today,

I don't think it would be allowed.

We're looking at a fulmar here, up on the rock face here.

It appears to be on a nest ledge there.

It should be sitting on one single white egg

at this time of year.

Wildlife enthusiast Colin Urwin appreciates the unique habitat

that has resulted from the construction of the road.

The fulmar is one of those odd species

that's in the ascendancy, as it were.

Over the last few decades, it has colonised a lot of coastal areas

around the north coast of Ireland,

and the west coast of Scotland,

where previously it was

confined to one small island

off the north-west coast of Scotland.

And so, at the time, of the coast road being built,

fulmars wouldn't have been here, at all.

It would have had a huge impact on the local wildlife at the time.

No doubt it disturbed, probably for years, the whole cycle of life

around this coastal whole area here.

But, as you can see, nature's very resilient.

It only takes a very short time for it to bounce back.

And if you look at the area now, it's teeming with wildlife, really.

If you were going to think about constructing a road like this

nowadays, I think there would be a lot of argument

around should the environment be disturbed

by blasting the cliffs back 40, 50 metres away from the sea?

There would be a lot of disturbance to nesting birds, to wild flowers,

to insects, all kinds of things.

It would be a very finely balanced argument whether it will be allowed

to go ahead or not. If it did go ahead, it wouldn't be without

a lot of environmental impact studies,

a very, very long process of bird surveys, wild flower surveys,

bat surveys, environmental impact studies.

It would be a very long process,

and there would be a lot of argument.

Environmental considerations are an important part

of any construction project.

It is a testament to William Bald's genius that his road

has withstood almost two centuries of onslaught from the Irish Sea.

Certainly nowadays, engineers and designers

would have to consider closely sea-level rises.

And it may be that you could still construct it,

but it would be the cost of the construction to future proof it,

because we all know that all the predictions are wildly variable

as to what level of sea-level rise

we'll see here in Ireland, in particular.

But to factor that into your design would make it so expensive.

I would say that coastal roads

would become very much a thing of the past.

The hardest part of my job on the coast road is dealing with nature,

it's dealing with the changes that are coming to the coast.

We are now seeing the sea level rise, even along the east coast.

And that places a challenge on us, because we're finding now that,

during the winter time, during winter storms,

we have waves breaching in places

they would never have breached before.

We've increased damage to our sea defences,

just because of the sheer power of the water itself.

An important feature of the road

is the use of what are known as revetments.

These are solid, sloping structures, which absorb the power of the sea,

and guard against coastal erosion.

Yeah, 22 metres of revetment, with reinforcing.

And if you could also put in ten metres of additional height

on to the tow, on to the existing new tow.

The crucial parts of the sea defence is the revetment.

If you lose the revetment, the next thing to go

is the parapet wall, and then the road itself.

In essence, its role is two-fold.

One is to take the energy of the waves,

whenever the waves are crashing in on the road.

And secondly, it's to provide side support for the road itself.

So, it's your retaining structure.

This is one of the very few remaining original revetments.

You can see the stone blocks that would have been built at the time

and tied in together.

It's amazing, whenever you think about it,

170 years old, and it still can take the worst of the storms

at Garron Point.

But again, very, very labour-intensive.

You can imagine how long that would have taken to set the individual

limestone blocks in and then pointed it in with lime mortar.

Amazing.

You know, 38km of road to do.

A lasting legacy of the road being built here is,

we're standing on a sea defence.

This road is a sea defence.

Can you imagine if this road hadn't have been built here,

how many acres of land we'd have lost to coastal erosion?

So, the road and the revetment has served to protect the land

on the landward side.

So, something that people don't fully appreciate -

this road has protected this coastline.

It may be a hard engineering solution,

but it has protected the coastline,

and that's a massive legacy.

Andrea Bald has marvelled at the engineering prowess

of her great-great-great-grandfather,

but remains frustrated in her discovery to find out more

about the man himself.

Who was William Bald?

Andrea travels to the Scottish island of Islay,

to meet William's biographer, Margaret Storey,

with the faint hope of establishing a personal connection

with her elusive relative.

-So, that's Rathlin...

-Yeah.

-..with the hills behind,

and the Antrim Coast Road.

And sometimes, you can see lighthouses all the way down,

-the whole way round...

-Oh, wow.

-..on the Antrim Coast Road there.

I mean, it really is very close.

At home, I have a nasty, half-sized photocopy of this.

MARGARET LAUGHS

At home in New Zealand.

It's extremely special to me. It started us on the track of...

-Of your ancestor.

-Ancestor, yeah.

Because this is what my dad found on the internet,

when he first started following that little path of,

"Do I have an ancestor that did the Antrim Coast Road?"

Dad's done much of the research from New Zealand on it,

and I have got quite obsessed with it in recent months,

in preparation for this trip, and I just find it fascinating,

but SO frustrating.

You know, when you look up Bald on the internet,

William Bald, on the internet, and you find hundreds of thousands

of entries to Prince William's bald patch, which isn't terribly helpful.

Yeah, I've noticed this!

Yeah, everything seems to be...

There's enough to make a fascinating and enough to try and follow a path,

but come to these dead ends.

It's so frustrating, because it must be there, but maybe it...

-No, it's partly, of course, because it's Ireland, as well.

-Yeah.

Because the records, you know,

lots of the census records and everything, went in Ireland.

-Well, I'm really interested in the family side of it.

-Mmm.

What his characteristics were,

because you want to see whether there's any continuation of that.

What bits can I see in myself, or in my father or in my son,

of what we know about William?

I think he was slightly stroppy, slightly impetuous.

Erm...

-He just fits the character of a Scot...

-Yeah.

-..at the time.

A man of parts - "a man o' pairts," as we say -

-who could turn his hand to many things.

-Yeah.

He was one of the very important people in Ireland

who contributed 30 years of work to the infrastructure.

He designed and built roads, piers, harbours, drainage...

-Latterly, railways and so on.

-Mmm-hmm.

And the whole time he was doing this,

he was actually interested in the intellectual side of it, as well.

He gave papers to the then-leading scientific organisations

in Europe at the time.

It's exceeded my expectations.

The sense of connectedness, being on the Antrim Coast Road,

the environment, the beauty of the Coast Road,

and how the Glens look,

and being able to pick up rocks off the shore,

to take home to Dad, to say,

"Here's a little piece of William Bald's road.

"Here's a little bit of rock that William Bald might have just

"blasted down off the cliffs"!

And that'll, you know, take pride of place on the bookshelf.

William Bald's iconic road hugs the coastline along East Antrim,

connecting the Glens and protecting the coastline

from the power of the ocean.

But how big an impact has it had on everyday life?

We've got a wee bit of a tailback, probably about two miles,

in the North Coast direction,

and a mile heading back down the coast there.

So, I think we are going to be

looking at at least 25,000 people plus through Glenarm today.