Dublin to Derry Coast

This massive horn of rock and cut granite

thrusts more than a mile into the Irish Sea.

We're on the very edge of Ireland

at the gateway to Dublin, one of the world's great coastal cities.

And Dublin's just the start.

Not one but three great cities will be our stepping stones

on this journey, as we get a uniquely Irish perspective on the coast.

Miranda Krestovnikoff has a day at the races,

and gambles on the tide.

Alice Roberts unearths the source of the salt we put on our winter roads.

Mark Horton investigates a lost year in the life of the SS Great Britain.

Absolutely ginormous!

While I'll discover how the sea has shaped the island of Ireland,

North and South.

Welcome to the capital coast of Ireland.

This journey takes us 300 miles through Ireland's two capitals,

Dublin and Belfast,

and on to Londonderry, the most ancient city of them all.

Sprawling out from the River Liffey,

Dublin is home to more than a million people.

That's over a quarter of the Republic's total population.

It was the Liffey and its link to the open sea that brought Dublin its prosperity.

This is Dublin's Great South Wall,

built nearly 300 years ago

to protect ships sailing into the River Liffey.

On the far side of the estuary is the Bull Wall, added a century later

and designed to stop the sands of Dublin Bay choking the river.

Almost two-thirds of the Republic of Ireland's sea trade moves through Dublin.

These two massive walls are still vital in keeping the seaway open.

Between them, the deep shipping channel remains open at all tides,

while the beaches on either side are dried out twice a day.

The sands stretch the full sweep of Dublin Bay.

I'd never been here before,

but Dublin writer Fionn Davenport revels in his city's secret riviera.

I never pictured Dublin like this, with a great huge beach.

15 miles of beaches stretching from the north, down to the very south.

It's great, isn't it?

I'm ashamed to say that when I hear the word "Dublin", I just think, you know, pubs and pints and Guinness.

It's exactly how we sell ourselves. This is the great secret of Dublin - our beaches.

We don't talk about them, we don't tell anybody about them,

and we keep them exactly the way we want them - empty.

The Irish are known for their hospitality, whether their visitors are invited or not.

Nowhere more so than Dublin.

In fact, historically, this city has scarcely been Irish at all.

The history of Dublin is the history of invaders.

I mean, right from the very, very start, it was created by invaders,

-populated by invaders, so in a sense, Dublin is an invader city.

-Who were the first people to settle here?

Oh, the Vikings, in the 9th century.

They came here on their raping, pillaging, warring ways,

and they settled, and built this trading port.

The name Dublin comes from the Irish "Dubh Linn",

and the original Viking settlement was built around this black pool.

-That's where the word comes from - "dubh" meaning black, "linn", the pool.

-Blackpool?

-Yes.

-I was hoping for something Gaelic and lyrical like "shining city by the sea."

-I know.

A Viking Blackpool - that's a scary thought.

Then, in the 1100s,

another wave of invaders flooded up the Liffey - the Normans.

They and their English successors would stick around for 800 years,

long enough to make a mark.

Dublin's best-known brewery,

Guinness, was founded by an Anglo-Norman family,

and Dublin architecture still reflects the longstanding link across the water.

-In Ireland's capital city, though, what is Britannia doing on top of that building?

-Ah, Neil,

because secretly, Dublin is still a little bit British. It's a very English city.

800-odd years of English rule -

Dublin was created, conceived of, developed and built by the English,

and this building behind us is the Custom House, which was built during the time

-when this was the second city of the Empire.

-I would have to dispute that as a Scot.

-We were always told that Glasgow was the second city of the Empire.

-But the Scots, you see,

the tragedy of the Scots is they were lied to for so long,

because in fact it was Dublin that was the second city of the Empire.

Today, Dublin takes second place to no-one.

Glass and steel has transformed the old waterfront.

It's Dubliners who are flooding to the Liffey now.

The quickest way out of Dublin isn't by boat

but by DART, the fast rail corridor that hugs the shoreline of Dublin Bay.

The DART has made these once sleepy coastal suburbs much more accessible

to commuters, but ironically,

locals will tell you that today owning a seafront property

is beyond the reach of most Dubliners.

Unlike Britain, Ireland gives artists and entertainers generous tax breaks.

For these glitterati, Howth Head has become an exclusive address,

with properties changing hands for over £5m.

I'm Dave Kelly, and I sell spectacular seaside homes to the rich and famous.

Welcome to one of Ireland's most exclusive residential addresses - Sutton Castle.

This house was commissioned in the 1890s by the grandson of John Jameson

of the famous Irish whiskey brand,

and it's recently been converted into luxury apartments.

It's as close to the sea as you can get without getting your feet wet.

A sea view can easily add tens of thousands of Euros to the value of a property.

And for an apartment in this particular complex, it can set you back

anything up to 3m euros, or £2m.

And like the froth from a Celtic Jacuzzi, new-build ventures

are spilling out well beyond Dublin Bay.

Security gates, a private yacht and a slice of the seashore.

Everything for the wannabe beach bum with deep pockets.

But no matter how secluded the setting, how idyllic the beaches,

there's one thing you can't buy for love nor money on this coast - warm water.

Oh!

In the name of the wee man!

The Gulf Stream today never gets this far into the Irish Sea,

believe me, making this water

some of the coldest anywhere around the British coast.

And if you'll excuse me, I have to go and cry.

No wonder these huge beaches seem so empty.

And yet once a year this coast witnesses an event that brings thousands flocking to Laytown.

Miranda Krestovnikoff has come prepared.

No diving gear, just a pair of binoculars.

Racing horses on the beach is a tradition that goes back centuries in Ireland,

but today, Laytown hosts the last remaining race on the seashore

that's held under Jockey Club rules.

Laytown is the only beach race in the whole of Europe.

The jockeys are here training in preparation for the big day,

and I'm here to find out exactly what it takes for a horse to win on the sand.

Marcus Callaghan is a local trainer and regular racer at Laytown.

Last year his six-year-old, Paris Sue, was a winner.

For him, the secret of winning starts with training on the beach.

I generally walk all me horses here.

During the summer, the ground's too hard to walk them on grass at home.

And it's just to walk them in a straight line,

it takes the pressure off their legs.

So that's why we come up to the beach, plus they enjoy it.

-What's Paris Sue like? Does she like it?

-Oh, she loves it.

-Yeah?

You won last year. Do you reckon you're gonna do it again this year?

Well, she'd have a very good chance if she gets in, so my main concern

is if she gets in, then I'd be happy, and then she'll take all the beating.

The Laytown Races happen just once a year when the tides are lowest.

Each time, the course is built from scratch,

and each time the organisers have their own race to get through the programme before the tide turns.

There's been racing here since 1867, and there's nothing else like it.

It's the only strand racecourse left.

There used to be quite a number of them here from Dundalk,

Laytown, down to Skerries,

and one by one, they fell by the wayside.

Erosion played a part - you know, if stones come on the track, you can't race.

This is the only one that's left, and it's a unique spectacle,

and it attracts huge numbers of people.

Racing here is so popular the organisers have to hold a ballot

to select which horses will run.

-Paris Sue has been drawn in the first race.

-I'd just like to have it over and done with.

Hopefully she'll win - I mean, there's no certainties, but she'll be the one to beat.

-Is she in pretty good condition?

-She's jumping out of her skin.

-She looked frisky earlier, actually.

It's keeping her fresh. Yeah, she's jumping out of her skin. All you can do is keep your fingers crossed.

Things are really hotting up here. The tension's building, people are placing their bets.

People have travelled hundreds of miles for this annual spectacle.

But the fact that the race is on sand makes the odds hard to calculate.

These horses have form on turf,

and now they're performing on sand,

so you have to take it on trust that the horse will run on sand.

They always used to say that training a horse on sand shortens its stride,

and they also said that a horse couldn't quicken on sand, so a front-runner had an advantage.

-So it is quite unpredictable, so you could get a real outsider that would come and win.

-Oh, yes, indeed.

-Fantastic.

-Which is part of the fun, because they're a holiday crowd, and they back outsiders.

Well, we're very interested in Paris Sue.

-She's at 7/2 at the moment - can I put a bet of 10 euros on Paris Sue?

-10?

-We want her to come in.

It's a six-furlong race and the going is...well, as good as it gets

when the tide's just gone out.

Just come forward - now just wait until everybody's ready, just wait! Come on!

With just two furlongs to go,

Paris Sue is struggling to quicken her stride.

My 10 euros could be running into the sand.

Come on, Paris Sue!

Come on, Paris Sue!

Close but not close enough. Paris Sue came in second.

Blocked in behind the front runner, she never found her true pace.

-So how was it?

-Yeah, everything went according to plan, except...

we didn't get the front run because they all know her by now and...

Was that at the beginning of the race? Because you say she likes being ahead.

Yeah, but they were all going that fast to keep her, though. No excuses,

we were beaten fair and square by a better horse on the day.

Oh, well, no winnings for me.

The organisers did win their race against the run of the tide,

but not for long, as every year at Laytown it's the sea that has the last word.

And there's always next year.

We've reached the River Boyne -

not just a waterway, more an artery leading to the ancient heart of Ireland.

It's so peaceful here today.

There's just me and some day-trippers, and the only sounds are from the sea.

It's hard to believe that so much of Ireland's history has happened around this one river.

For 5,000 years, since the first Neolithic farmers,

the mouth of the Boyne has been the gateway to Ireland's fertile heartland.

It's been navigated by Celtic traders, Viking raiders and Norman invaders.

Striding north, the flat coastal plains of the Irish midlands

give way to the mountains of Northern Ireland.

But in this border country,

a landscape much older than any national frontier divides Ireland.

60 million years ago, as the dinosaurs were dying out,

the Earth's crust stretched and fractured here.

Explosive volcanoes erupted, and mountains were thrown skywards.

Its legacy is the rugged shoreline around Carlingford Lough.

On the far side of the lough is Northern Ireland,

but I'm still in the south, and it's a Euro zone.

But this close to the border, the Euro and sterling co-exist,

and for a few, that presents a lucrative opportunity

to exploit the difference.

Why's it so busy?

-Well, I suppose because it's cheaper.

-How much cheaper?

Er... Approximately 20% cheaper on both petrol and diesel.

So if you were filling up a typical car, what's the saving?

Approximately £12 sterling.

-That's a brilliant saving.

-Yep.

Where exactly is the border?

-I challenge you to find it.

-You're on!

And he was right - despite having different capitals, different laws and different currencies,

the border between North and South has vanished altogether.

The first sign that you're in the North is the one in miles per hour.

Nature makes a better fist of a frontier.

The massive granite buttress of the Mourne Mountains is a formidable obstacle.

The mountains seem to push the coastline further and further to the east.

Wherever the landscape does soften,

like Dundrum Bay, it seems that all the sand in the Irish Sea

has suddenly washed ashore.

Few vessels survive an encounter with these treacherous sands,

but one ship that did manage an astonishing escape was the SS Great Britain.

Mark Horton investigates how Isambard Kingdom Brunel

turned a potential disaster into a marketing triumph.

I adore the SS Great Britain.

She's a great survivor, and now rests proudly in Bristol,

where she was built, 160 years ago.

She was the world's first propeller-driven steam ship, has an iron hull

and was the brainchild of the great engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

But in 1846, Brunel's reputation

was threatened when the Great Britain ran aground in Dundrum Bay.

I've come to find out how the Great Britain

was stranded on this beautiful bay, and to work out how she was rescued.

Under the command of Captain Hoskins, the Great Britain left Liverpool bound for New York.

She was to sail past the Chicken Rock lighthouse on the Isle of Man,

then turn north. In fact, she sailed straight on

towards St John's Point on the Irish coast.

A very dangerous part of the coast indeed. There was probably an average of one ship a year wrecked

-before the famous wreck of the Great Britain.

-What, coming onto these jagged rocks?

And onto the sand - a treacherous place. The ship would break up in the breakers very, very quickly.

And presumably that's why the lighthouse was built here.

It was indeed. There was a lot of pressure on the government

-over many years to make Dundrum Bay safer for sailing ships.

-But what I can't understand

is how somebody could confuse that lighthouse for one 50 miles away

on the south end of the Isle of Man.

-But surely this lighthouse was also shown on the charts.

-Captain Hoskins maintained it wasn't.

That lighthouse was built in 1844,

and the incident was September, 1846.

He said his chart was out of date.

So he had this chart - there was one lighthouse -

it must be the Isle of Man, therefore he had to sail round it.

That's what he thought he was doing, and sailed straight up on the beach.

When daylight came, the SS Great Britain was stuck fast,

and resisted all attempts to refloat her.

For Brunel of all men, this would not do.

He came to Dundrum himself to work out a solution.

If we're really going to understand how difficult it was to rescue the Great Britain from this beach,

we're first going to have to work out exactly where she lay.

Hi, Shane.

Maritime archaeologist Shane Casey has been researching the official report into the grounding.

Today the sands are empty.

Our only reference point is the watch house from where local coastguards

made their observations of the stranded ship.

The Tyrella coastguard watch house is north-easterly 527 yards

from the ship. That's about 480 metres.

And northeast is 45 degrees, so we need the back bearing of of 45 degrees, that's what?

225, which is in that direction,

-towards those mountains over there.

-OK.

And 480 metres, we're already 200 metres from the watch house.

-Right, that leaves 280.

-280 to go.

475...

476... 477...

478... 479...

-480!

-Right.

X marks the spot.

And how did the ship lie?

"The ship's head lies northwest by west."

Which is in...that direction there.

While we don't know the Great Britain's exact position,

we can be sure of her dimensions.

Go slightly to the left, can you?

That's about right!

The ship was 322 feet long by 50 feet broad.

That's almost 100 metres by 16.

Are you not there yet?!

97 metres!

Gosh!

Absolutely ginormous!

Seven metres in this direction, so the stern is about here.

So we now walk round the curve of this great ship.

Brunel's Great Britain weighed more than 3,000 tons,

and her keel was buried six feet into the sand.

The extraordinary thing is how anyone could even have conceived

-of getting it off here.

-Yes, yes.

-Most engineers would have left her here, abandoned.

-Yeah, yeah.

That wasn't Brunel's style.

With the winter gales upon him, he had to find a way to protect the Great Britain

from the pounding seas that were threatening to break her up.

This is Brunel's original letter, where he sent instructions.

That's right, and Brunel conceived a plan for protecting the ship

with an immense latticework framework.

-We've got a latticework there.

-It's very bendy and feeble, isn't it?

-I mean, how can this protect a ship?

-He wanted to create a barrier that would stop the waves.

-Acting like a bit of a breakwater.

-Right.

Much of the power of the waves would pass through the latticework,

-dissipating itself on the framework.

-The whole thing is held with flexible poles.

That's right. These were beech trees that were unseasoned

-so that they had sufficient spring in them to bounce back.

-It all looks a bit makeshift -

-more Heath Robinson than Brunel.

-What do you reckon?

-Fantastic - there's the latticework there.

Yeah, I think our model pretty closely resembles it. Will it work?

Well, it really does work, doesn't it? Because the water comes up

and smashes against the side here - it's like a pond inside.

-And the ship's perfectly protected, isn't it?

-What about the other one?

-There it goes!

-Wow, oh, dear.

Smashed to pieces in a few minutes!

Brunel's ingenious latticework bought him precious time.

For nine months, he oversaw repairs to make her seaworthy.

Finally, at the end of August, 1847,

on the highest tide of the year, she was re-floated.

Brunel was vindicated,

his design for the SS Great Britain

fully proven.

If you know where to look, there's actually quite a lot left from the grounding of the Great Britain here,

bits of wine bottle and coal that were jettisoned

when they had to lighten the ship.

But actually, the real legacy of the incident is that it convinced

a sceptical Victorian public

that iron ships were practically indestructible,

and that opened up the way

for reliable long-distance passenger travel.

Strangford Lough is the largest tidal lough in the British Isles.

It has 150 miles of its own twisting shoreline and more than 120 islands.

The coast near here draws many visitors, but,

as Miranda Krestovnikoff has found, some are more vulnerable than others.

You can tell a harbour seal by his short, round head.

They're also known as common seals, which isn't really fair, because

these endearing mammals aren't at all common around the Irish coast.

Every year, the harbour seals

come back to the same rocks to give birth.

It's really great to see them just behind me

in this sort of family setting - the mothers there, with their pups.

But out of the water, their natural environment, they're really vulnerable.

And that's the problem.

With Belfast only 30 minutes' drive away, humans are encroaching

on the seals' traditional habitat more and more.

For seals, any disturbance by boats or jet skis at pupping time can result

in mothers panicking and leaving their new-born alone on the rocks.

More and more pups are being abandoned like this.

There's a good chap...

But though they don't know it, these seals are rather lucky,

because one of the world's leading seal experts, Sue Wilson,

-has also chosen to make her home here.

-You'll be taking over this in a few minutes.

She's determined to make sure as many new-borns as possible survive.

I sometimes see a pup that's on its own that isn't attended by a mother,

and if I don't take it, it will die.

And because I know I can take it and save it,

it will survive, so we can't...

I don't think we can stand back, especially if it means seeing a young animal suffer.

For Sue Wilson, taking a pup like this one home

is the least worst option.

Each season, she's faced with rescuing two or three pups.

She has to care for them till they can feed themselves.

The rescued seal pup's now just ten days old, and Sue's looking after it at home.

Last year, I completed a sea mammal rescue course,

so I'm really interested to find out how she's getting on

and how Sue's coping with looking after such a small pup.

The pup has been given the name Laura,

but Sue has no intention of getting too fond of her while they're together.

'The point is to get Laura back as quickly as possible.'

I wish she'd suckle on a bottle, but she won't.

'It usually takes more than three months to get a pup back to the wild,

'but Sue believes that's just too long away from their natural habitat.'

-She's not going to bite me, is she?

-Probably not.

'She's developed a fast-track approach to nurturing them, using a special substitute seal milk.'

Now, what you have to do is, when the tube goes down,

-watch it here to make sure it's not going down into the run.

-Oh, right, here.

-Yeah.

So we will see it in just a moment. There it goes.

So now we know it's in the right tube, and then we just make sure she's breathing.

-Yeah.

-And then we put the funnel on and then put a tiny...

just to make absolutely sure, just a tiny wee bit first of all.

I'm very aware that if she's been brought up by you and fed by you,

she's not seeing other seals, she's not learning about fishing or anything like that.

How is that going to affect her in the future?

Well, in the wild, they don't seem to learn anything about fishing from their mother.

And a mother feeds them milk, and she'll swim round the shallows

with them and explore, but so far as we know, they take no...

Beg your pardon!

-LAUGHTER

-Was that a burp?!

As I was just saying, she doesn't, in the wild, learn to feed with her mother,

and she doesn't take any solid food until after she's weaned,

at about three to four weeks of age, so I try to simulate that.

'It's just five weeks since Laura was removed from this beach.

'For Sue, it's time to get her back to the environment where she belongs.'

She will go in and start, we hope, to feed

on little tiny fish with other pups, just like all the others do.

It's like a mum letting her child go away to university.

Well, the great hope is that she wants to go.

'In the short time that she's been looking after Laura,

'Sue has learned that six harbour seal pups have been found dead on this coast.'

There she goes!

'Sue knows that she may never see Laura again,

'but she's convinced the pup now has a fighting chance of surviving in the wild.'

If Strangford Lough is for the seals, there's no dispute about its neighbour to the north.

Belfast Lough has been claimed by people.

A 12-mile long natural inlet, it was re-fashioned into

a commanding thoroughfare for Belfast's shipping industry.

This is the perfect view of Belfast.

And you know, it's amazing how small she looks just nestled so naturally between the shores of the lough.

Those two yellow cranes are towering over Harland & Wolff shipyard.

They're still the most dominant structures in the city.

Last time, we came here to discover how Belfast built Titanic.

This time, we're on a mission to uncover who built Belfast.

Belfast is the most industrial city in Ireland.

It defies nature that it's here at all.

Like Dublin, Belfast grew up around a tidal river -

the Lagan.

The original site was a ford, just where the river is spanned by these bridges.

Close by, they're building a 29-storey skyscraper.

Drilling for the foundations reveals just how much of Belfast

is built on mud and salt water.

That's the stuff they call sleetch!

I think you and I would call it filthy stinking muck.

In a funny way, it smells a bit like the sea.

It's got that pungent smell about it, like seaweed,

but seaweed that's been trapped underground for a long, long time.

But the point is, all of Belfast is built on top of that.

Kerry Greeves, the project engineer, is tackling the same problems as Belfast's original builders.

-The bedrock, which is sandstone, is about 50 metres down.

-50?

-Yes.

We have to use piles, which are going down on this side

approximately 28 metres, and that's what will hold up the building.

So the piles don't reach the rock?

-No.

-So the building is just floating on...mud?

Well, you could say that.

As an engineer, it's slightly more technical than that, but effectively yes.

Belfast's founding fathers floated their dream here on the shoreline.

Local author Glenn Patterson has summed up their achievement with these lines.

"Belfast is a triumph over mud and water,

"the dream of successive generations of merchants, engineers and entrepreneurs,

"their names driven like screw piles into the city's sense of itself.

"Dargan, Dunbar, Workman, Harland..."

The thing is, they're all Scottish or English names, Protestant merchants attracted here

from the beginning of the 17th century by the promise of land at the water's edge.

I wanted to hear more from the man who celebrated these entrepreneurs.

A lot of people came here with ideas about settling this place, developing this place.

Some bloody-minded people, you would have to say.

This isn't a promising place to make a city.

Belfast has no business being here at all.

So what was behind the stubbornness?

Something must have attracted them and made them stay.

Belfast, although it's very unpromising, it's got all that muck, that sleetch,

you had to dig right down and sink your foundations if you wanted to build here,

you could actually make bricks out of the clay of the city,

so, in a sense, Belfast is a city that's made of itself.

Every inch of Belfast's industrial heartland is man-made,

dredged and reclaimed from the salt-water shore in the 19th century to underpin its expansion.

But to build on that growth, Belfast had to look seawards again - to trade.

When you look at this vast port, it's almost as though this water matters more than the land.

Well, certainly without this, without the trade - I mean we're sailing past these container ships here -

without that, Belfast wouldn't have developed in the way that it did,

and without the port, there wouldn't have been any of those great industries of the 19th century.

So this city really is defined by this water.

Belfast, the floating city, two thirds of our way from Dublin to Derry.

We're travelling in style again.

Spare a thought for anyone stuck in their car.

But we're about to pass a well-kept secret that keeps traffic moving whatever the weather.

It's still the middle of summer, but just beyond Carrickfergus

a year-round industry is busy stockpiling for the winter.

Alice Roberts is about to venture into an underground world that's never been filmed before.

If you're driving along on an icy winter's night

and your car's not skidding, it's probably because

the gritter lorries have been out,

and the rock salt could have come from here, on the coast of Northern Ireland.

Half a million tons of rock salt are shipped from this little jetty every year.

This corner of Ireland sits on top of huge deposits of subterranean salt

that stretch all the way across Europe to Russia's infamous salt mines.

These strata were laid down over 250 million years ago

by successive seas advancing and retreating across the continent.

'I don't know quite what I expected from a salt mine,

'but what I never imagined was being able to drive all the way underground.

'Our guide is Jason Hopps, the mine surveyor and, yes, salt of the earth.'

-So how deep does this go down?

-The maximum depth in the mine

is 1,150 feet. This is us just entering the salt now.

Here's all the salt crystals.

Yeah.

-We're coming into quite a big cavern.

-Yes, this is where the main workings first started.

So this has all been excavated out?

Yes. It's all blasted.

Yeah. It's a real labyrinth of tunnels down here, isn't it?

'There's over 30 miles of tunnels, yet only 40% of the rock salt in any area is extracted.

'The rest is left as pillars to shore up the workings.

'The scale of these man-made caverns is amazing.

'Even the largest of the excavation vehicles seem dwarfed.

'Some of the trucks are up to 40 years old,

'but although the atmosphere is salty, it's also extremely dry, so they hardly rust at all.'

It's really strange, it's like walking onto the set of a James Bond movie, isn't it?

It's bizarre. How is rock salt actually formed to begin with?

Why is there this seam of salt 800 feet under the surface?

It's basically an old landlocked sea that has evaporated and left the salt behind.

It's happened in total five times in this particular area.

We've got a full succession of five salt beds.

At the minute, we're in the fourth deepest, so there's three above us.

-So there have been several sort of evaporated sea beds laid down one on top of another.

-Yeah.

Although we call it rock salt, it is sea salt, it's just sea salt that's got trapped in rock?

It's sea salt with certain other trace elements.

Yeah. It's weird cos there's quite a lot of dust in the air

-and you just taste the air, you can taste the saltiness.

-Oh, it is salt.

-It's sodium chloride.

-Yeah.

'We still have to drive down another 300 feet to reach the faces that are

'currently being worked - a full 1,150 feet below ground.

'I've been wondering where everyone is!

'The rock salt is attacked from two directions.

'First, it's undermined with a gigantic cutting blade that takes a ten foot deep slice from underneath.

'Then holes are drilled above, ready for explosive charges to be inserted deep inside the rock.'

-Can we go a bit closer?

-Yes, we can go down and see.

-So this is an undercut.

-Right.

That advances in ten feet, which is the same length as your drill hole.

So this is one of the drill holes?

-Where you put the explosives in?

-Yes. We pack the explosives in there.

That drill hole's ten feet deep by 50 feet wide by 20 feet high

gives us a full face of 600 tons.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-So when the explosives are stuck in here and they go off,

-we've got 600 tons of rock salt fall to the ground.

-600 tons, yes.

ALARM BLARES

'Time to withdraw to a safe distance, I think.'

EXPLOSION

So this is the last stage of the process?

That's been blasted off, hasn't it, that rock?

-Yeah. That will have been blasted last night.

-Right.

And then, it'll be taken up to the crusher or an underground stockpile.

Right.

And where does most of the rock salt from this mine end up?

20% of it or so will end up on the Northern Ireland and Ireland roads.

-Right.

-50 or 60 then would go to either England or Scotland

-and then maybe 20% to the East Coast of the United States.

-Oh, really?

-Yeah.

'A little salt can go a long way.

'Next time you're snowed in, take a good look at that gritter up ahead.

'Chances are that's not any old salt.

'It's actually 250 million years old and comes from 1,000 feet under the Northern Irish coast.'

The coastline of Antrim is a switch-back journey through space and time.

Black basalt from ancient volcanoes is spewed over white limestone.

The layers twisted by earthquakes and worn down by wind and ice.

It's taken almost 2 billion years to create this undulating landscape

and its glens roll down to the sea in great, green waves.

Until the 19th century, the peoples of these glens were all but cut off by land.

The easiest way to travel was by the small boats known as gigs.

The traditional rivalry between these villages re-emerges

with a vengeance during the annual gig racing season.

Break, fly by. Break, fly. That's it.

I'm Arnold Stewart, secretary of Carnlough Rowing Club.

'You get like a real buzz and it's a lot of excitement and the adrenalin starts to run.

'You're listening to the oars as you're rowing along, there's a clunk every time.

'Everybody's really pulling together.

'Its origins maybe started about the 1800s

'and it really was quite along the whole of the Antrim coast.

'All the villages along the shoreline had a crew or crews.

'Inter-club rivalry and inter-village rivalry is very much a key part of the rowing.

'We've been doing this for so long and everybody'

is out to win, and that's where you get the the competitive edge.

Go on, boy. Go on. Go on.

'Because the Black Rock sits out to the end of the bay,

'it was decided at one time that they would create a race out of this,

'so it was a challenge from rowing from the harbour, out round to the Black Rock and back in again.

'A distance of 1.2 nautical miles.

'Every year, we have this challenge to see how well we can do

'and if anyone can get close to the time of 15.45 seconds,

'which no-one else has beat since 1926.'

Keep it going. Come on.

Go on.

And relax.

'Today, the best time in the gig is in 17 minutes plus,

'so it's a bit off the record.'

Fair Head frames the north-east corner of Ireland.

Stretching for three miles, with vertical columns of basalt rising 600 feet above the sea.

Here, the hexagonal stones of the Giant's Causeway stretch out into the North Atlantic.

And there's one little challenge I can't resist - to take my chance on a bridge over the Atlantic.

I wasn't too keen to do this, but there's lots of little old ladies

on the other side, so I thought I'd better crack on.

It's 96 feet to the water below me.

The rope bridge is thrown across to the island of Carrick-a-Rede every summer

and it's not just a tourist trap.

For the last 500 years, local fishermen have used it to reach their salmon nets.

The further west you go, the wilder this coast gets.

This is a landscape that encourages mavericks.

But it's not an Irishman who stands out from the pack, it's a Cornishman -

an eccentric artist who built his fantasy home out of what he found all around him.

Alice Roberts is on his trail.

Well, this is what I've come to see - Bendhu House.

And perched on the cliff top, it looks like a Second World War fort, but it is somebody's house.

'It was in 1936 that Newton Penprase, a Cornish artist,

'first had his dream to build a house to match his vision of this coastline.

'For the next 40 years, he worked almost single-handedly to achieve it.

'Michael and Lorna Ferguson live here now,

'but their first impressions were rather like mine.'

-It's a very strange house.

-Yes, this is how I remember it whenever I would pass as a child.

Coming down, fascinated by, "What's going on?

"What is this man building?"

So you'd seen this house as a child and you ended up living in it?

Well, I didn't dream I would ever be living in it.

Nor, I must say, at a time had any wish to live in it.

Many people loathed Penprase's unconventional design, not least the planning authorities.

But he persevered using whatever materials came to hand, all picked from the seashore.

-In the drawings he got approved, it says, "all in concrete".

-Right.

So everything was from the beach initially. He washed the sand

from the water that came down the cliff

and most of the cement was carried down on his shoulder from the harbour road.

The bricks were made out of gravel and sand

and I think he put a lot of extra windows probably in the process as well.

'In all, Penprase put in no fewer than 50 windows,

'making the most of Bendhu's panoramic views

'from Scotland in the East to Donegal in the West.

'When the artist died in 1978, the house was still unfinished,

'but Michael and Lorna have completed his dream.'

That really is a fantastic view, isn't it?

Well, Alice, this is the room that we added on.

The rest is Penprase, but this is what we interpreted

he would have liked us to do with this part of the house.

So if you want to come on through with us.

Right, let's head down below.

Alice, this is the Zodiac room and you'll see why when you look up at the ceiling.

That's amazing.

These are canvases that Penprase painted and he always invited the ladies to lie down in the bed,

to look up and he would explain all the Zodiac signs.

Really, right, I see!

It's almost like you're living in an art installation.

Yes, I think that it is. Hopefully, whatever we've added, Penprase would approve of.

-Would you ever sell it on?

-Oh, no, it's become part of our life.

-What do you think, Michael?

-I'd have to finish it, but I don't think we'd ever move.

Bendhu House is now a listed building.

Proof that true individuals like Newton Penprase can still have the last laugh.

If artists and fishermen can do their own thing on this coast, why not clergymen?

These are the remains of an 18th-century palace no less.

Home to Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Londonderry and Earl of Bristol.

An unassuming man(!)

A little pile perched on the cliff edge

was the Earl-Bishop's personal library.

And our last great coastal city was his seat -

Londonderry.

Of the three cities, Derry has the longest recorded history,

but we're going to revisit events that unfolded at the end of World War II.

It's a story that's intrigued me for years.

Like Dublin and Belfast, Derry sits where a river meets the sea - the River Foyle.

Until recently, Derry was a key naval base.

The most westerly deep-water port in Europe.

But Derry's history goes way back - more than 4,000 years.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The next station is Londonderry.

Time enough, you'd think, to settle on a name.

Some folk call this place Derry.

Others call it Londonderry.

It's even been called Derry/Londonderry.

But simplest of all is Stroke City.

Stroke City - Irish humour trying to soothe a centuries-old Irish headache.

And it's Stroke City's strategic position on the coast that's behind it.

Easily defended, and with access to the sea, Derry was - like Dublin -

a key prize for the English settlers of Ireland.

It became the personal fiefdom of London merchants who fortified the city and renamed it.

Derry became Londonderry at a stroke.

Unlike Dublin, Derry has never assimilated its differing traditions.

The bitterness is plain for all to see.

Yet within living memory, Derry's position on the coast

pitted its people against a common enemy.

During World War Two, Derry's docks were packed with warships.

As the key base for the North Atlantic, it played a vital role in defending Allied convoys.

'These were unprecedented times.

'No matter what their background, many Derry people joined the war effort.'

-It's quite a haunting scene to me.

-It surely is, and to me.

-'Maeve Kelly was among them.'

When I think of all those years.

-This is me on the first day in the Wrens.

-A good looking lassie.

Now, was I not?

"Maeve Boyle, who served with the Wrens in her native Derry,

"photographed on her first day in the service."

And why did you join up?

Because everybody else was doing it and it was a job.

'German submarines surrendered in satisfactory numbers...'

In May 1945, German U-Boat commanders finally accepted the war was over.

And it was to Londonderry that the North Atlantic fleet came to surrender.

Almost by chance, Maeve found herself witnessing history.

My boss at the time said, "There's submarines coming up the Foyle.

"Would anybody like to go down and see them coming in and surrendering?"

And anything for a couple of hours out of the office, I said, "I'll go."

And there I stood and watched this long line of about 13 submarines.

I've got photographs of the event.

See this has only ever been about photographs for me until today.

That's the captain there, and that's Sir Max Horton,

representing the British Navy, taking the surrender - is that what you do?

-Take surrenders.

-Did you see that happen?

Yes, yes. This man came forward, took his cap off

and walked forward with his hand outstretched to shake this man's hand.

He completely ignored it.

-He wouldn't shake his hand?

-He wouldn't.

Admiral Horton, who was one of our submarine aces in the last war,

went on board as soon as the U-boats tied up.

The war in the Atlantic had been bitter.

German U-boats had sunk over 2,000 Allied merchant ships

and killed over 30,000 of their seamen.

As a former submariner himself, Horton found it hard

to shake his enemy's hand, even in the moment of victory.

At the time, did you realise the significance of what you were seeing?

Oh, not at all, not at all.

No, no, I mean I was only out for the afternoon.

I was just glad to get a couple of hours off from the office.

No, I hadn't the wit to know that I was looking at history.

What Maeve had witnessed was the final act of World War Two in Europe.

From Lough Foyle, the surrendered U-boats were towed into deep water and sunk.

They still lie off the coast of Londonderry.

We're at the end of a remarkable Irish journey

through Dublin, Belfast and Londonderry.

Three great cities shaped over centuries by the sea.

Each one different.

Each reflecting a distinctive facet of this often fractured island.

What connects them all is the coastline itself,

that fragile margin where the sea meets the land.

Endlessly captivating, occasionally turbulent,

constantly open to change.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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