NORTHERN IRELAND - Culture in Cultra

Lets start by improving your rolling stock recognition abilities.

Trains run by NI Railways are silver and blue, those operated by Iarnrod Eireann are silver and green. The sight of one of the latter at Belfast's Lanyon Place station today proves that cross-border services are operating normally despite the ongoing UK/EU Sausage War.

The Ulster Folk and Transport museum occupies a sprawling site at Cultra, 7 miles east of Belfast and the best way to get there is by train as the station at Cultra has direct access to the museum.

The folk section is a large open air museum which follows the same format as St Fagan's in Cardiff, Beamish in Northern England and the Black Country Museum in the Midlands. The museum is set in the period around 1900 and has an "urban" section with shops, churches, terraced housing and other village buildings. Then there is a country section consisting of farm, cottage and mill buildings spread out across several acres of parkland.

There were several of these one room dewllings where humans and animals lived together

I was particularly intrigued by the notice in the doctors which gave information on how to deal with someone with Consumption - many of the instructions have a lot of relevance with the ongoing pandemic.

To be perfectly honest, the museum needs more than one day, but with limited time in the afternoon I continued to the transport section. This consists of a series of galleries containing mainly large exhibits relating to trains, trams, buses and cars. There is also a very good section which covers the Titanic. There are additional galleries for air and sea transport but these are closed for refurbishment.

Because Cultra is on the southern shore of Belfast Lough and the evenings here are long at the moment, after the msueum closed I walked along the shore of the Lough for a couple of hours and got the train back from further down the line.

This arch, under Helens Bay station was built so that Lord Dufferin's carriages could gain access via his own private carriage drive to the railway station to collect and drop off visitors to the Clandeboye Estate.

Crawfordsburn Beach