I have written here before about my history of complicated attraction to miserable-delightful Protestant coastal towns. Well now I have a new one. Our household has been struggling to not go to Donaghadee. Once, we even ‘double-Donaghadeed’ – went to Donaghadee twice in one weekend, on Saturday and Sunday.
This craze started last summer when we discovered a café, Bridewell, on the main street. It’s housed in an old building, a ‘bridewell’ (a jail apparently). Everything about it is nice, though we mainly go there because it’s dog friendly.
That dog is another reason for our trips east. Donaghadee beach is often non-existent, but close by, past the mile of mansions that overlook the Copeland Islands, is Groomsport. The coastal walk here takes you through a series of sandy crescents, grassy turf, and Gaudi-smooth rock formations. Keep walking and you’ll get to Orlock (pictured), a National Trust-owned area with a secluded, rugged path over muddy fields and stoney beaches and, probably, rum hidden in coves. It’s a fantastic trek.
What about Donaghadee town (or ‘Donaghadump!’, as two different people called it when I tested out my Donaghadee-is-so-underrated thesis)?
It’s known as the homeland of loyalist media sensation, Jamie Bryson (yes, spotted on the street once), a male voice choir, and Wikipedia tells us that TV adventurer Bear Grylls spent the first years of his life there. In fact, it’s ‘the best place to live in Northern Ireland’, according to an advert for a local housing development which, amusingly, we spotted about twenty minutes after I had joked with Wife that we should really move to Donaghadee. I wouldn’t go that far, literally.
Donaghadee is also the Hollywood of North Down (not to be confused with Holywood which is the Holywood of North Down). The 2015 film, Robot Overlords, starring Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley, was filmed here, a story about invading machines from outer space which, it just occurs to me now, may well have been an allegory of the Ulster Plantation since most of the seventeenth century Scottish settlers entered through the port of Donaghadee. Of course, it wasn’t. Was it? The town is also the fictional ‘Port Devine’ of the BBC series, Hope Street. Last autumn, it was the location for a Nordic noir film set in the Faroe Islands.
The sea-front street curves past a great new playpark, the harbour, and towards what I am calling the ‘iconic’ white lighthouse. As I learned on Danders Aroon, an Ulster Scots walks programme broadcast on NVTV community television, and later proved myself, you can keep walking past the Pier 36 restaurant, through boat yards to the Commons, a coastal park, and then do a loop back to the town along the road. As well as our café, the main street has grocers and butchers, a few more cafés, chippies, ice cream, and ‘Ireland’s oldest pub’. And there’s a hilltop castle.
All it lacks is a train station, which, of course, it once had – until 1950.
So, criminal feuds aside, there is not much not to love about Donaghadee. Maybe it’s the Scottish surname, drawing me in mid-life to a coastline where Scotland is part of the daily scenery.
Whatever the reason, everyone needs places to anchor themselves. They come and go. Donaghadee, right now, is a welcome harbour.
David Mitchell 