The ancient mountain kingdom where fantasy comes to life

The Hare's Gap mountain pass along the Brandy Pad smuggling trail. (Dawid Kalisinski/iStockphoto/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

The dense forests, twisting rivers and granite peaks of Northern Ireland’s Mourne Mountains have lived many lives and assumed many names.

They’re Westeros in “Game of Thrones.” They’re “Krypton” in the Superman prequel.

They’re also Transylvania in “Dracula Untold,” Sherwood in the upcoming “Death of Robin Hood,” and the Forgotten Realms in “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”

As part of the Mourne Gullion Strangford global geopark, this mountain region in Ireland’s northeast achieved UNESCO recognition in 2023, but relatively small numbers of international visitors come to explore.

However, the lyrically named Kingdom of Mourne — it was never a sovereign state — has been inspiring imaginations globally for more than 75 years.

This sea-lapped landscape of 220 square miles (570 square kilometres) was the real-life inspiration for “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the enduring 1950s novels by Belfast-born writer C.S. Lewis soon to be revived once again. They’ll get their fourth film adaptation in “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” later this year.

Small and compact

While Gerwig’s “Narnia” is being filmed in England, Northern Ireland has a booming local film industry. Production of Season 1 and 2 of the new “Game of Thrones” prequel, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” is estimated to have returned more than US$80 million to the economy alone.

“We are a small and very compact country. In fact, we are effectively the size of Greater Los Angeles, but with about 10 per cent of the population,” says Andrew Reid, chief content officer for Northern Ireland Screen.

Only 1.9 million people live in Northern Ireland, but at any one time there will be 1,200 people hard at work on live-action scripted projects.

Thanks to good road infrastructure, crews can head in any direction from a production base in Belfast and quickly access a diverse range of landscapes — as can the fans and tourists who come to the region in their wake.

“You can be on a beach in the morning,” and back in Belfast in the afternoon, says Reid, or “up a mountain one day,” and then on a river, lake or in a forest the next.

Soft hills and rolling farmland

The coastline north of Belfast, with its windswept vistas reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands, has some of Ireland’s most dramatic scenery, including the world-famous Giant’s Causeway.

An hour south of Belfast, the Mourne Gullion Strangford global geopark is a softer landscape, with rolling hills and shadowy dells in which it’s easy for the mind to conjure up magical beasties.

“I have seen landscapes, notably in the Mourne Mountains and southwards, which under a particular light made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge,” wrote C. S. Lewis in his essay “On Stories.”

He was more specific in a letter to his brother Warren, writing, “that part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.”

The Lewis boys spent childhood vacations in Rostrevor, a neat and gaily painted village, now dotted with literary murals, close to the Northern Irish border.

To its north rise the mountains, richly forested in towering sitka spruce, one of the world’s tallest trees, and at their feet lie the still waters of Lewis’s beloved lough, a glacial ford which opens into the Irish Sea.

Thrown by a giant

Lewis wasn’t the first to dream of giants here. From the village, you can saunter past the Fairy Glen (reputed haunt of the “wee folk”) and climb the mountainside to discover spectacular views and a peculiar 50-ton (45-tonne) boulder perched unexpectedly almost 1,000 feet (about 305 metres) above sea level.

The scientific explanation is that Cloughmore (from the Irish for “big stone”) is a glacial erratic, thought to have originated in Scotland and been deposited here by retreating ice at the end of the last Ice Age.

The mythical version is that it was thrown here from across the loch by Finn McCool, the legendary titan who is also credited with building the Giant’s Causeway some 100 miles (160 kilometres) north.

The Mournes were formed by volcanic activity more than 50 million years ago, in tectonic shifts related to those which formed the Causeway’s basalt columns before it.

It was then sculpted by successive Ice Ages, meaning that the mountains – fittingly for a “Game of Thrones” filming location – are a true “land of fire and ice.”

Santa’s cottage and the ‘magic hill’

North of Rostrevor, in the heart of the mountains, Leitrim Lodge has been a frequent filming location, including as the lands north of Winterfell in Season 2 of “Game of Thrones.” (Winterfell itself is at Castle Ward estate, some 30 miles, or 48 kilometres, northwest).

It’s also where, explains Reid, C.S. Lewis went on family picnics and entertained his young cousins with “little stories about dwarf armies and this, that and the other.”

The farmer’s cottage where Arya and the Hound took refuge in “Game of Thrones” Season 4 is a seven-minute drive away, close to “Santa’s Cottage,” Ireland’s “official residence” of Santa Claus. Father Christmas’s appearance in the Narnia books is a seismic event, but in this Hilltown attraction it’s a calendar staple, every November and December.

Locals also head to the “magic hill” near Spelga Dam to experience an intriguing natural phenomenon. An optical illusion here creates what is sometimes called an electric brae: A parked car with its handbrake off will appear to roll uphill on this quiet side road.

The Mourne Wall

During Lewis’s boyhood, the 20-year Mourne Wall building project began. This epic 22-mile (35-kilometre) boundary, built to keep livestock from polluting water supplies, was constructed using the classic dry-stone technique that characterises the area and was completed in 1922.

The granite bulwark runs like a seam across the peaks and is now a popular hiking route taking in seven of the 10 highest 600-metre-plus mountains in Northern Ireland.

Unlike the famous barrier in “Game of Thrones,” however, there’s no “north of the wall”: This wall runs in a circle.

At 354 metres, Hen Mountain is one of the Mournes’ smaller peaks, but it’s achieved new heights of stardom by appearing in the show poster for “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”

Walking along the well-maintained path through the valley on a spring afternoon, the coconut scent of yellow-flowered whin bushes sweet in the air, I have the whole place to myself. It’s hard to imagine this pristine expanse filled with the crowds and clatter of a full-scale HBO production crew. (HBO is owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, the same parent company as CNN).

“We have a strong sustainability element to our work,” says Reid, which means the mountains are left just as they are found. “We have to be grateful for and respectful of the work groups and individuals have done for decades to keep the Mournes clean and protected.”

Tollymore Forest Park

By far the most popular filming location in the Mournes, appearing in everything from 2025’s “How to Train Your Dragon” to the regrettable medieval stoner comedy “Your Highness,” starring James Franco and Natalie Portman, is Tollymore Forest Park.

It’s not hard to see why. This enchanting 630-hectare state park is filled with stepping stones, 18th-century follies and a total of 16 bridges across the babbling Shimna River.

Above the majestic treeline there are panoramic views of mountain and sea, while the Gothic gate arches and intriguing structures such as the hermitage lend it a Middle Earth feel.

Tollymore played a starring role in the very first episode of “Game of Thrones,” which launched 15 years ago this month in April 2011. This is where The Starks discover the dead stag and the orphaned direwolf pups in the woods. It’s also where the Night’s Watch first encountered the White Walkers, in a plot development that would instruct the whole future of the series.

Warm hospitality

A homegrown Irish giant of 6 feet 9, actor and tour guide Flip Robinson was a body double in “Game of Thrones” for the character of Hodor, the Stark family servant. Now he runs Giant Tours Ireland, taking customers on “Game of Thrones” location tours across the region.

It’s “quite incredible how screen tourism has really established itself here,” he says. “With ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ coming back here, we were really excited about that.”

Visitors to the Kingdom of Mourne and the Mourne Gullion Strangford Global Geopark will find an invigorated hospitality scene too.

The seaside village of Dundrum, recently named by The Times as one of the best places to live in the U.K., has a food scene that belies its population of 1,500. On the village’s main street, The Buck’s Head, helmed by Michelin star chef Alex Greene, has a Stark-worthy name and top-tier cuisine.

For a more rustic meal, Downpatrick’s Fodder in the Woods, close to “Game of Thrones” locations such as Inch Abbey,” serves its own grass-fed Dexter beef burgers inside a woodland tipi.

Charlie Chaplin was a former guest at the Slieve Donard, a grand Victorian railway hotel in the seafront town of Newcastle, in the shadow of the 850-metre mountain from which it takes its name.

It’s next to the Royal County Down golf club, which last year was namechecked in the Seth Rogen comedy series “The Studio” as “the best golf club in the world.”

Hidden away in the forests of the Enniskeen Estate, just a couple of miles from town, and little known even to locals, is Ireland’s only five-star glamping retreat.

The Enniskeen Estate and Forest Spa, next to the Enniskeen Hotel, which has a fading grandeur of its own, has welcomed A-list guests including fantasy royalty himself, “A Song of Fire and Ice” creator George R. R. Martin.

On its website, Hugh Jackman, star of 2026’s “The Death of Robin Hood,” speaks of his “magical” stay: “I will definitely be coming back.”

By Maureen O’Hare, CNN