2016 is the year for this slack character to climb Cave Hill, when the rain stops long enough for the paths to dry. Should anyone else out there whether city-born or incomer have likewise stared up at Belfast’s small mountain-top, intending to do it some day, let me offer solidarity if only to pile on self-encouragement. A vow made between Christmas and New Year: what could be more binding?
Though coaxing from the wrong direction can work the wrong way. All of 40 years ago a much respected editor of a Dublin paper liked to hymn the beauty of Belfast to his young northern staff. The Lough, the fine Victorian buildings, the hills that cradled so much cramped redbrick, Napoleon's Nose, the cave where Jemmy Hope convened the United Irishmen: would we realise how honoured we were to be newspaper people in such a city, how we should celebrate the place.
He delivered this sermon with fatherly entitlement. We were only in our twenties, beginners or at least new to big papers, out of our depth in the paper's Dublin HQ, and we listened to him with something like awe. It still didn't make a single one of us climb Cave Hill. The discourager was the baggage, the background. There was a lot we didn't know yet. But when Douglas Gageby assured us that northern Protestants were Irish though some didn't realise it, we knew it was him who had it wrong. When he said would we stop writing disobliging analysis that had unionists daily more anti-Irish rather than less, get out of the office, up into the hills and commune with the spirits of Hope and Wolfe Tone and the rest of them, we became more anti-Cave Hill by the day.
It had something to do with the realisation that Gageby's fabled love of Belfast, his birthplace that he'd left for Dublin as a boy, was itself a bit of a myth. When he came up to buy us dinner in a rich daddy-ish way, three courses and the brandy he liked to finish up with, he got us to come out and meet him at Hillsborough.
Belfast, sure enough, had more of its fine Victorian buildings then than now. It also had bombs and bullets flying. It might have been the city of the Presbyterian enlightenment, of Mary McCracken and a fine anti-slavery tradition. In the dark in 1975 and sometimes by daylight as well it was a place of indiscriminate terror. The 1975 Dublin of half-demolished Georgian squares and a poverty Belfast scarcely matched held society status for Gageby, comfort and cachet, and an identity he treasured as born-again Irishman, Trinity graduate, proud veteran of the Irish Army Intelligence corps. None of that meant a thing to us. All we knew was that his Belfast of old maps and historical figures didn't fit with ours. We did the best we could at ground-level, with the story on the streets, and to give him his irritated due, he printed most of it.
But he was right to tell us to look up at the hills. While British Ministry of Defence fencing kept the rest blocked off for almost another three decades, Cave Hill, with a dignity born of rough good looks as well as that vantage point, was the stretch we could have climbed.
Everyone needs space. Some have held on to pride in the city through bad years and despite hard knocks in their own lives.
The opening up of Colin Glen, of paths now cleared and mapped over the hills gives people ownership of a town so contested and so bruised it can seem to have no settled sense of itself. Walkers, climbers, knowledgeable citizens, say with possessive pride that Belfast looks well from above. They remind those who will never own houses or gardens that the hills are theirs.
There is of course more than one website to reinforce the message, and at least one has a comments section to shame you, or me. Like `My nine year old daughter and I walk this regularly'. Though not all the commenters nor all the walkers are fit parents. `Good boots aren't essential, I even saw one woman with her handbag in heeled shoes.' I wasn't so taken by `Even in the pouring rain I love it' but I did like `It has been over twenty years since I last walked over these hills'.
See you at the top. No high heels, and no waving.
