The Gobbins Cliff Path

History

The Gobbins cliff path, on the Islandmagee coast in County Antrim, was built as a tourist attraction by the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway Company. Its chief engineer, Berkeley Deane Wise, who had already built paths and a tearoom at Glenariff and a promenade and bandstand at Whitehead, saw that the dramatic coast, the new leisure travel and the growing railway could be combined in one attraction. Construction began in 1901, and the first section, a pathway from Ballystrudder to the foot of the cliffs, opened in August 1902. The steel girder bridges were built in Belfast, brought to Whitehead by barge, taken up the coast on rafts and winched into place from the clifftop. A suspension bridge across the mouths of the Seven Sisters caves, opened in 1908, was the last extension, and Wise died in 1909.

The path was closed during the Second World War, reopened by the Ulster Transport Authority in 1950 and closed again in 1954 because of landslips and maintenance problems. Larne Borough Council later announced a plan to reopen it, with new bridges and elevated paths and replicas of the original Tubular Bridge and the suspension bridge at the Seven Sisters. The rebuilt path opened in August 2015, a £7.5 million scheme to which Mid and East Antrim Council gave over half the funding. It closed in December 2015 after a landslip damaged the access path, and by April 2018 had been open to the public for only about nine of its first 32 months, the Belfast News Letter reported. Mid and East Antrim Borough Council is now its custodian.