Wild camping near Helen’s Tower: report with photographs

Love is in and out of time,
I am mortal stone and lime…

(Tennyson, ‘Helen’s Tower’)

It’s been a couple of days since I posted anything here. It’s been a busy weekend, but it was great to get out for the first wild camp of the season. I met up with a few guys from the NI WIld outdoors community for an overnighter in Clandeboye forest, not far from Belfast.

For February, Saturday afternoon was surprisingly warm. For February, it was unsurprisingly damp. In fact, it looked like it might rain into the night. But we got pitched between the rhododendrons.

And even collected rainwater off the tarp to make tea.

The camp set, and the rain eased a little, I hiked uphill through the woods to Helen’s Tower. I remembered the landscape from childhood adventures here, but I haven’t visited in decades. The path was veined with the roots of the Scots pine planted by Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1826–1902) when he inherited the title of Baron Dufferin and this Clandeboye estate.

Helen’s Tower, glimpsed there through the woods, was completed in 1861 in the Scottish baronial style, and named after Dufferin's mother, Helen Selina Blackwood, granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan the Irish playwright and politician. The tower’s the centrepiece of a planned landscape that was, at least in part, an aristocratic attempt to make work for tenants suffering during the Great Famine of the period.

The tower served as a retreat for Dufferin’s friends and the artists he patronised. It inspired poems (well, doggerel verses) by Tennyson, Kipling, Argyll and other Victorian literati. Here are a few lines of Tennyson’s:

Helen's Tower, here I stand,
Dominant over sea and land.
Son’s love built me, and I hold
Mother’s love in letter’d gold.
Love is in and out of time,
I am mortal stone and lime.
Would my granite girth were strong
As either love, to last as long

However, the tower’s symbolism shifted after the battle of the Somme in 1916, where tens of thousands of soldiers of the 36th (Ulster) Division, who had trained around the estate, were slaughtered. In their memory, in 1921 funds were raised by the families of the fallen and an exact replica, the Ulster Tower, built on the battlefield at Thiepval.

The Tower of Hate is outworn, far and strange:
A transitory shame of long ago,
It dies into the sand from which it sprang

(Robert Browning, ‘Helen’s Tower’)

The Tower is available for holiday letting as part of Irish Landmark Trust’s portfolio of restored properties. It has also been used by the makers of Game of Thrones. One Youtuber caught the set. You can feel the white walkers lurking...

Thankfully, winter did not seem to be coming. The rain stayed off, and we gathered wood for the night’s fire.

And from the lake, beneath a pretty sunset, ducks, swans and coots cried, and pheasants could be heard calling from the undergrowth around us.

You can find out more about Helen’s Tower and the estate here and here.