Undulating glens, beheadings and births, Irish folklore and a crazy Khaleesi fan. A drive through Northern Ireland's coastline mapping locations used in Game of Thrones includes all this and more. Spoilers ahead…
Ballintoy Harbour preens under northern ireland’s summer sun in hues of blue, brown and green, but it hasn’t quite shed its foreboding on-screen avatar as Lordsport Harbour in Pyke, one of the Iron Islands in the fictional world of Westeros.
It made its debut in season two of HBO’s cult series, Game of Thrones, an adaptation of American author George RR Martin’s long-running fantasy saga A Song of Fire and Ice. And what a chillingly breathtaking debut: It’s a gun-metal grey day when one of the characters, Theon Greyjoy, pulls into Pyke after an absence of nearly a decade. Lordsport is as bleak as the sky above. Cold, unforgiving and stunning.
Today, however, Ballintoy Harbour in Ballintoy village, County Antrim, is at its sunny best. It’s overrun by families and tourists who throng to a nearby cafe, Roark’s Kitchen, to soak in the atmosphere and relive the scene when Theon tries to seduce Yara, not realising that she is his sister. “When the HBO crew descends on the village to begin shooting, one of the first things they do is start removing any signs of modernity. Every little thing from streetlights to the slates on the roof of Roark’s Kitchen is removed. When they finish at the end of the season, they put everything back in place,” says Philip McComb, the enthusiastic tour guide of McComb’s Travels, which runs Game of Thrones tours from Belfast in Northern Ireland. (He is not the owner of the tour company even though he shares his second name with it.)
I get back onto the tour bus where the title track of the show rises above the murmurs of my fellow Thronies. Philip, who has a store of trivia and behind-the-scene stories, is the ultimate GoT fan. He’s growing a beard to play an extra in Season 5. “Extras with real beards get used upfront in battle scenes,” he says. He can’t decide if he wants his character to die a horrible death so that he can get more screen time, but his fate will rest in the hands of the directors. Just over six feet, 30-something Philip is a little too lanky to pull off a brawny solider, but stranger things have happened on the show.
Kwang, a Thronie from Korea, chimes in. “Did St Paddy also have fire-breathing dragons?” he asks. “Nah… but St Paddy did rid Ireland of snakes. We don’t have a single snake on the island,” the tour guide replies.
(This story appears in the Sept-Oct 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)