Derry: Ireland’s only remaining walled city is often overlooked by travellers

Ahead of St Patrick’s Day, Sharon Stephenson tried to get grips with Derry’s complex history.

There’s a scene in the first episode of Derry Girls, the brutally funny coming-of-age story of five working-class 90s Catholic schoolgirls, where one of the characters introduces herself as “living in Derry – or Londonderry, depending on your persuasion”.

It isn’t easy getting your head around a city so divided it can’t even agree on its name. According to the 1613 Royal Charter, Londonderry is the official name, championed by Protestant unionists who support Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK.

Those on the Catholic side of the fence tend to prefer Derry, while the local council has settled on Derry City. Still others take the hyphenated middle ground of Derry/Londonderry (hence its nickname, Stroke City).

For the purposes of this story, let’s go with Derry.

Surrounded by gently rolling hills and rubbed by the River Foyle, Derry is often overlooked by travellers. Because before the superb Derry Girls burst onto our screens, this city of 150,000 really only registered in headlines of complex conflict and sectarian violence that many of us couldn’t understand.

Derry, it turns out, is believed to be the birthplace of The Troubles, the 30-year-old struggle between Irish nationalists, mostly Catholic, who fought for full independence from Britain, and Protestant ‘loyalists’ who wanted to keep Northern Ireland a part of the United Kingdom (which is it today).

“It’s complicated,” says our guide Ronan, of his city’s history. In a Liam Neeson-style brogue that has us hanging off every word, Ronan (“The only half-Japanese, half-Irish man in Derry”) tries to unpick the blood-soaked history of this region located near where the Wild Atlantic Way meets the Causeway Coastal Route.

Complicated is a word we hear 800 times during our two-hour tour (rough estimate). Other words that make frequent appearances include violence, religion and, eventually, peace.

We start our tour where everyone should – the 1.5km circuit of the 17th century city walls that wrap themselves around Derry’s historic centre. Fun fact: Derry is the only remaining completely walled city in all of Ireland.

Walking clockwise around the elevated walkway, we pass the starkly modern Millennium Forum, Derry’s main entertainment venue, before the view opens up across the river and the surrounding suburbs.

A quick history lesson: the still-intact walls were built during the Plantation of Ulster, the early 17th-century colonisation of Ireland under King James 1, which saw native landowners supplanted by English and Scottish settlers. That, as you can image, caused some unrest so some bright spark had the idea of building a wall to defend the English and Scottish settlers from the Irish rebels.

Given how distracted I was by Ronan’s sexy accent, I can’t say for sure how many gates there are but I counted at least seven embedded in the city wall. And 12 or so cannons, including Roaring Meg, the most of the famous of the cannons used during the Siege of Derry in 1688-89. Astoundingly, the walls have never been breached, even though it appears the world and its mother have tried.

We are in Ireland, after all, so the historic walled city is home to St Augustine’s Church and St Columb’s Cathedral (believed to be the oldest Christian site in Derry). They’re both contenders for the ‘prettiest church I’ve even seen’ award, especially if you’re as lucky as we were and the choir are practising.

We end our tour at the Guildhall, the imposing neolithic building which has anchored one corner of Derry since 1890. Trying not to take a million photos of the Guildhall is about as hard as making sense of The Troubles. Ignore the fact that it’s home to the council and mayor and instead focus on the stained glass windows that depict the city’s history and the kind of oak-panelled Gone with the Wind staircase that makes you want to slide down it (or is that just me?)

When it rains, as it might well do in Derry, head up those stairs to check out the Plantation of Ulster Exhibition, a fascinating spin around the colonisation of Ulster during the reign of King James I in the 17th century (don’t miss the Great Parchment Book and the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to John Hume in 1998).

Contrastingly starkly with the city’s 17th century old town is the Peace Bridge. Opened in 2011, this 235m of steel and bitumen flings itself across the River Foyle and, as the name suggests, symbolises a coming together of two communities – the Catholic-dominated centre on the west bank and the historically Protestant east side.

Start at the Guildhall and work your way to Ebrington Square, once an army barracks that was once a no-go area. Today the barbed wire has gone and in its place is a hive of public activities and lively restaurants and bars, including one in the former horse stables. If beer is your thing (or flannel shirts, man buns or gorgeous accents), stop in for a pint at the excellent Walled City Brewery.

You can’t get away from recent history in Derry. We drive to suburb of Bogside – so called because it was once underwater – to see the murals that climb the walls of terraced houses, a visual journey of the conflicts and injustices of The Troubles.

“Welcome to Free Derry” announces the much photographed wall that I vaguely remember from the 6pm news. As you’d expect, some of the depictions are pretty poignant, from the images of hunger strikers to the faces of those who suffered.

If we’d had time I would have loved to have popped into the Museum of Free Derry, which is dedicated to the civil rights era and, says Ronan, definitely worth a look. But they say that in every place you visit you should leave something to do on your next trip, so next time I’m in town the museum is going to the top of my list.

Derry history can require some heavy emotional lifting so there’s nothing like Irish humour to break the ice. When Ronan busts out a few lines from Derry Girls, we laugh like drains.

“A visit to Derry without paying homage to the Derry Girls mural is a bit like making dinner without potatoes – it just can’t be done,” he jokes leading us to the enormous mural of the five lead characters on the back of Badger’s Bar and Restaurant, opposite the Foyleside Shopping Centre (where there’s an excellent branch of Marks & Spencer).

Naturally, there’s a Derry Girls Tour, which takes visitors past filming locations such as the Guildhall and Dennis’ Wee Shop in Bogside, which frequently pops up in the show.

“It’s nice to be known for comedy rather than war,” says Ronan. “The world is finally seeing that despite the conflict there’s a lot of joy in Derry.”

Fact file:

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The writer was hosted by Luxury Gold.