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Antrim Coast Road - from 'Traveller in the GlensThe following text is excerpted from Traveller in the Glens' by Jack McBride, published in a new paperback edition by Appletree Press.
The obstacles are legion. Rocks had to be blasted, the sea had to be restrained from washing the newly-made road away, the overhanging cliffs in places had to be quarried back far enough to make the passage below them safe and, where other methods failed, the road had to be built away from the cliffs on land reclaimed from the sea itself! A short description of the general procedure should be of interest. In the first place, a strong foundation was laid, this being effected by blasting pieces of the cliffs away, then utilising the huge boulders thus obtained as a bottom. Over this was spread layer after layer of stones, each layer of smaller-sized pieces than the last, until the required height above high-water level was obtained. You know the sloping surface that surrounds the base of a sea-girt lighthouse? Well, the base of the road was given a slope after the same principle, a ‘battery’ it was called, and that battery has withstood the gales and heavy seas of a century without more than one or two small breaches each winter. John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836),the Scottish engineer who invented the process of road-surfacing that bears his name, had his method adopted in laying our Coast Road, and it was macadamised (later tar-macadamised),until some stretches of it, notably Cushendall – Waterfoot, were asphalted a few years ago. The only danger encountered by constant users of the Coast Road is from falling rocks. In winter the rain gathers in crevices in the cliffs, and lies there until the frost widens these crevices, then at the thaw portions of rock are dislodged and may start a miniature avalanche. Several of these falls have been rather serious as, for instance, that at Garronpoint in 1911 or 1912 when hundreds of tons of rock fell on the road and completely blocked it. (By the way, the writer remembers seeing ‘Poet McKie’ coming hurriedly from his house just below Dunmaul. No wonder! A huge boulder weighing at least a ton had rolled down the hillside, bounced up on to the roof of the cottage, and was now reposing in the ruins of his bed in the ‘room’!) It has been suggested that to minimise or perhaps completely remove this danger a careful survey should be made of all cliff-faces adjacent to the road and the necessary steps taken to blast away or quarry any of the loose or out-jutting pieces. Jack McBride's book Traveller in the Glens has just been reissued in a paperback edition by Appletree Press.
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