Croft Holiday Let - Self Catering Apartment in Ballygally Northern Ireland

In the early 19th Century the Glens of Antrim were comparatively isolated form the rest of the country.  This difficulty of approach allowed outlaws and smugglers to operate without fear of reprimand from authorities.

Before the Coast Road was constructed the old road which linked Larne, Glenarm and Carnlough went up and down the various headlands.  Much of the road was very muddy with treacherously steep slopes, and made transport by wheel car very difficult in the best of weather. 

The Glens were opened up with the building of the new ‘Grand Military Road’ along the coast.  A Scottish engineer, William Bald, is generally credited with this marvellous feat of engineering, though there were also others involved.  However, the section from Larne to Cushendall, mostly at the foot of the cliffs, was accomplished because the Scot devised a method of blasting the chalk cliffs so that the huge blocks rested on the water’s edge and formed a foundation.  In his Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1835 James Boyle mentions:

“A part of the lime road from Glenarm to Larne under the Board of Works, has just been opened; in travelling by it, the dreadful hill, ‘The Path,’ is avoided.  The construction of the new line of coast road to Larne will, it is to be thought, be of material benefit to the farmers of this parish, as they will then be enabled to take their produce to that market both for sale and exportation, the hilly state of the road between these towns having hitherto been a total barrier to carrying and carting.”

The total cost of constructing the Coast Road was £37,000.  In 1978 a plague was erected on the Coast Road near Larne in memory of Bald’s significant achievement.  It reads:

“The Antrim Coast Road,
constructed
 1832-1842
by the men of the Glynnes
under the direction of
Wm. Bald, C.E., F.R.S.E.”

Since the construction of this coastal route a century and a half ago, the road has been closed many times between Larne and Carnlough because of landslides and the erosion of the causeway by the sea.  On February 1967 over 200 tons of rubble slipped into the roadway at Glenarm.  A new causeway was built about 90 feet away from the cliffs towards the sea with 255,000 tons of basalt and limestone being transported from a quarry at White Bay to make a foundation in the sea.  The new roadway was reopened in June 1968, but four months later it was swept away in another storm.

Some time later the road was reopened and so far has remained intact.