Be honest about Ballymena and it makes more sense: the town itself is a busy mid-Antrim market town, pleasant enough but not the reason you’ve come. The reasons sit on its edges. If you do one thing, climb Slemish – the stump of an extinct volcano east of the town, traditionally the hillside where the boy who became Saint Patrick is said to have herded sheep as a slave. If you do two, add Gracehill, the only complete Moravian settlement in Ireland and now Northern Ireland’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site. Both are short drives out; treat the town as the base it is.
Slemish Mountain
Slemish rises to 437m about 10km east of Ballymena, near Broughshane, and you can see why early people thought it special – it stands clean out of flat farmland, a 60-million-year-old volcanic plug. The climb is short but it earns the word: a loop of roughly 1.5km gaining about 166m, an hour up and down, on ground that is steep, rough and slick after rain. Wear proper boots, not trainers, and skip it in low cloud, when the views that are the whole point disappear. On 17 March it’s a different scene entirely – Saint Patrick’s Day brings a pilgrimage and a crowd up the hill. There’s parking at the trailhead, with a small charge on the busiest days.
Gracehill
Gracehill, just outside the town, was laid out in the 1760s by the Moravians, a Protestant church of central-European origin, and it survives as a complete piece of 18th-century planning: a square, the plain church at its centre, separate terraces that once housed the single brethren and single sisters, and God’s Acre, the graveyard where everyone gets the same flat stone regardless of rank. It was already Northern Ireland’s first conservation area; its inscription as Northern Ireland’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site sealed it. You can wander the village freely or take a guided tour; the old school house holds a museum room and a café.
Arthur Cottage and Galgorm
A few miles out at Cullybackey is Arthur Cottage, an 18th-century thatched cottage that was the ancestral home of Chester Alan Arthur, the 21st President of the United States. Arthur himself was born in Vermont, but his father emigrated from here, and the restored cottage runs demonstrations of the old skills – spinning, and soda bread baked over the fire. It’s a small thing, well done, and a genuine thread between Antrim and the American story.
For something at the other end of the scale, Galgorm on the western edge of town has grown around a 17th-century castle into a large spa-and-golf resort, with a championship course that has hosted the Irish Open. You don’t have to book a treatment to walk part of the grounds, but it’s primarily a place to stay and be pampered rather than a half-day’s sightseeing.
In the town
The People’s Park, north of the centre, is the town’s green heart: 45 acres around a lake, given to Ballymena by Sir Robert Adair in 1870 and now a Green Flag park. It has play areas, four floodlit tennis courts, a bowling green, an outdoor gym and a community garden, with swans and geese on the water and a steel sculpture, Five Apples, by the Japanese artist Shiro Masuyama. Paths are level and paved, there are toilets and free Wi-Fi, and dogs are welcome on a lead. It’s genuinely good, and free.
Where the Adair castle once stood – a Scottish-Baronial pile built between 1865 and 1887 by the Belfast firm of Lanyon and Lynn, and gutted by fire in 1922 – there’s now a quiet heritage garden of low walls and earthworks by the Braid River, free to walk and signposted with the story. The Braid on the High Street houses the Mid-Antrim Museum, with free exhibitions on the linen trade and local history, plus a theatre and café. There’s a Norman motte at Harryville on the south side of town, and the town’s early-Christian roots reach back to the 5th to 7th centuries.
The town carries its own scars of Irish history: in the 1798 rebellion, United Irishmen took Ballymena and stormed the market hall, killing three of its defenders. Today the Saturday market still runs under trading rights granted by Charles I in 1626, and the place is proud to claim the actor Liam Neeson as a son of the town.
Getting there and around
Ballymena is on the Belfast–Derry railway, roughly 45 minutes from Belfast and a little over an hour from Derry, with Ulsterbus services out to the surrounding villages. There are free and paid car parks around the centre; disabled bays are on Wellington Street. The obvious onward run is east into the Glens of Antrim and the Causeway Coast – Glenariff’s forest and waterfalls are within easy reach – with Antrim town and its castle gardens a similar distance to the south.