Will Ferguson - Beyond Belfast

PENGUIN

BEYOND BELFAST

WILL FERGUSON is a three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. His previous travel memoirs include Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, covering his travels in Canada, and Hitching Rides with Buddha, a critically acclaimed account of Fergusons end-to-end journey across Japan by thumb as he follows the cherry blossoms north. His novels include Happiness, a satire set in the world of publishing about a self-help book that actually works, thus causing the end of the world as we know it, and Spanish Fly, a coming-of-age story set amidst the con men and jazz-club grifters of the 1930s.

ALSO BY WILL FERGUSON

FICTION

Spanish Fly

Happiness

TRAVEL MEMOIRS

Coal Dust Kisses: A Christmas Memoir

Hitching Rides with Buddha:

A Journey Across Japan

Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw:

Travels in Search of Canada

HISTORY / HUMOUR

Canadian History for Dummies

How to Be a Canadian (with Ian Ferguson)

Why I Hate Canadians

AS EDITOR

The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour

AS SONGWRITER

Lyricist for the songs Con Men and Call Girls, Part One, Losin Hand, and When the Carnival Comes to Town, on the Tom Philips Spanish Fly album

PENGUIN

an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc., a Penguin Random House Company

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First published in Viking hardcover by Penguin Canada Books Inc., 2009

Published in this edition, 2011

Copyright Will Ferguson, 2009

Cover design: Daniel Cullen

Cover image (boots): Shutterstock

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Ferguson, Will

Beyond Belfast : a 560-mile walk across Northern Ireland on sore feet / Will Ferguson.

ISBN 9780143170624

Ebook ISBN 9780735238176

1. Ferguson, WillTravelNorthern Ireland. 2. Ulster Way (Northern Ireland)Description and travel. 3. WalkingNorthern Ireland. 4. Northern IrelandDescription and travel. 5. Authors, Canadian (English)20th centuryBiography.

I. Title.

DA990.U46F37 2011 914.1604824 C2010-906087-3

Visit the Penguin Canada website at www.penguin.ca

v5.3.2

a

When you take a path, the path takes you.

IRISH SAYING

I first walked the Ulster Way in the fall of 2000, at the dawn of the new millennium, as a fragile peace settled over Northern Ireland. Thirty years of bloodshed, of punch and counterpunch, of death and counterdeaththat apocalyptic chain of events known with uncharacteristic understatement as The Troubleshad finally come to an end, and travellers were beginning to rediscover the North. I returned to Belfast in 2008 to reclaim my familys lost estatesuch as it was. This is the story of those two journeys, the first across a landscape and the second into the past.

At the Belfast airport, watching the carousel turn, playing a game of match the luggage to the tourist, I placed my bets.

Lumpy duffle bags: a tangle of young men as loosely packed as their belongings, shirts untucked and hair uncombed. A scuffed and bestickered guitar case: the goatee in the corner. A canvas rucksack, well travelled, with bandana tied on by way of identity: that would be hoisted onto the tanned shoulders of an athletic and lonely-looking young woman with hair pulled backand there she was now, looking sun-creased and beautiful. Down the chute slid a procession of cardboard boxes rigged up with packing tape and binder twine. These were pulled off, one by one, by a familya large, motley family that was apparently using the airport as a postal service. There was a frazzled mother in a far corner, slumped in a chair, surrounded by a nest of diaper bags and blankets and various pieces of apparel, as though she and her toddler had decided to bed down right there. The largest, most unwieldy bag would be hers.

And now, coming down onto the carousel in shiny unblemished nylon, a sleek, high-tech, space-age backpack with superfluous straps and a metal frame sewn right into the fabric for maximum efficiency in weight-load distribution. This was the sign of a nave and doomed endeavour. This was the sign of someone on a collision course with reality.

I wrestled my backpack off the carousel, dragged it outside.

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IT WAS BILLED as the longest waymarked trail in the British Isles. Stitched together over the 1970s and early 80s, the Ulster Way turned a slow circle through the six counties of Northern Ireland, beginning and ending in Belfast, following coastlines and country lanes, forested paths and moorland heights, old canals and ancient pilgrimage routes. Depending on which source you consulted, the Ulster Way was anywhere from 520 to 630 miles long, a discrepancy that should have raised more alarm bells for me than it did.