UK Hotel Review: Bushmills Inn, Antrim Coast, Northern Ireland

What’s the craic?

The Causeway Coast - which stretches from Belfast to Derry - is one of the most scenic driving routes you can find. It’s 250km of blinding vistas, so you’ll need somewhere to refuel both your car and your stomach. The 41-bedroom Bushmills Inn is that place. Located in the Northern Irish town of Bushmills, this former coaching inn was built in 1608 as a haven for saddle-sore visitors, who would stop in for a drop of the famous local whiskey (distilled in the same town) on their way to the Giant’s Causeway. Four hundred years later, it’s still serving as a welcome pit stop for weary travellers.

The rooms

There’s a warren of rooms leading off the inn’s creaky corridors. Go for one of the newly-renovated Garden Suites for a split-level space complete with a huge bed, free-standing bath and those rectangular tiles that were once used in public loos but are now incredibly trendy.

This former coaching inn was built in 1608 as a haven for saddle-sore visitors

Located in the newer part of the building, the walls are a little thinner in these rooms, but they’re a welcoming space in which to recover from your liquor-fueled antics.

The food and drink

Expect full-on Irish hospitality, dishes and portions at the Inn’s cosy restaurant. We tried the onion and Guinness soup served with chunks of soft wheaten bread, before a humongous sirloin steak and a platter of Irish cheeses (with sourdough bread and homemade chutney). To finish? It’s got to be whiskey, obviously.

We tried the onion and Guinness soup served with chunks of soft wheaten bread, before a humongous sirloin steak and a platter of Irish cheeses

Either have it at your table or squeeze into the adjoining Gas Bar, where local men and women sing and play fiddles, banjos and whistles. Soak up the booze the next morning with sizeable Irish breakfasts including potato bread and black pudding. And tea. Mugs and mugs of it.

Nearby

Make sure you don’t leave town without trying a 12-year-old single malt at the Bushmills Distillery (the oldest in the world).

Just minutes away is the Giant’s Causeway, a stack of 40,000 hexagonal columns that were built by the giant Finn McCool (or formed by cooling lava, if you’re a geography bore) – take a few snaps before moving on to wobble across the 20m-long Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge.

When driving along the coast, you could opt for the ‘scenic route’ (aka the even more scenic route), which winds high above the sea, with just the narrow roads, tractors and sheep for company. And your map reader, of course.