Broharris Canal – Lough Foyle bird walk

The Broharris Canal lasted barely a decade. Cut in the 1820s for about £4,500, the two-mile (3.2 km) channel ran south from Ballymacran Point on the shore of Lough Foyle, bringing kelp and shellfish ashore and draining the wet farmland behind it. The traffic soon dried up; by the late 1830s the canal was being left out of official waterway surveys, and seepage reduced it to a shallow ditch. What survives is its line across the marsh, now folded into the Lough Foyle Trail – a flat, free, eight-kilometre walk that is far more about birds than boats.

Don’t arrive expecting locks or a towpath of keepers’ cottages. The canal today is a reed-fringed cut you could walk past without noticing; the reason to come is the estuary and its birds, not the engineering. If you have an hour and a pair of binoculars, time it for winter and a falling tide.

The walk

From the car park at Station Road, Ballykelly, the gravel track runs behind the sea wall with Lough Foyle on your left. After about 3.5 km it climbs a little and turns sharp right to follow the bank of the Burnfoot river – the old canal cut – before a footbridge carries you across to the Ballymacran side. Turn left there and the track hugs the sea wall past the bird hide, on toward Myroe and the looping ‘horseshoe bends’. It carries on another 4.5 km to the Roe Estuary; there is no loop, so you simply turn back when your legs, or the light, say so.

Four access points let you start or finish wherever suits: Station Road in Ballykelly, Carse Road at Broharris, Ballymacran on Carrowclare Road, and Shore Avenue at Myroe. The surface is mostly compacted gravel and bare earth, with short paved, wheelchair-friendly sections by the Ballykelly and Carse Road car parks; wear proper shoes for the rest, which turns soft after rain.

The birds

Lough Foyle is a Ramsar wetland of more than 5,400 acres – intertidal mud and sandflats, salt marsh and brackish ditches – and the walk skirts its edge for its whole length. The hide on the Ballymacran side looks out over feeding grounds that fill at low tide: whooper swans and Brent geese in winter, with bar-tailed godwits, oystercatchers, curlews, redshanks and common terns among the regulars. Early morning gives the best light and the calmest water. A low tide is what you want, since it exposes the mud the flocks come to feed on.

What the canal was

The canal had two jobs: a navigation cut for small boats, and a drain for the marshy slob land at the foot of Binevenagh. Its odder cargo was fertiliser, kelp and shellfish raked from the banks west of Magilligan Point at low tide and spread on the sandy fields to feed the crops, alongside heavier goods brought round from the port at Londonderry.

Limavady wanted in. In 1827 the town petitioned for its own canal to Lough Foyle, and the Dublin engineer John Killaly surveyed a separate cut of three miles ten chains (about 5 km) with two locks, costed at £12,000. It was never built: a horse-drawn tramway was proposed in 1832 and the canal plan quietly dropped. Broharris was abandoned soon after, and the bigger scheme it might have grown into never came.

Getting there

The canal sits off the A2 between Ballykelly and Limavady. From Derry, head south on the A2 for roughly 15 km, turn for Ballykelly and follow signs to the Station Road car park; Carse Road is signposted from the Myroe side if you are coming from Limavady. Ulsterbus serves Ballykelly, and the nearest train station is Derry/Londonderry, about 15 km north. Carse Road has only a handful of spaces, so on a fine weekend start from Station Road instead.

For a fuller day, the Roe Estuary adds more wetland walking at the trail’s far end, the Broighter Gold Économusée near Limavady tells the story of the Iron Age gold hoard found in these fields, and Limavady Workhouse gives the harder social history of the 1840s.

Practical information

A last tip

Tides move fast on Lough Foyle and the old canal mouth floods at high water. Check a tide table and aim for mid-to-low tide; that is when the channel’s line and the full sweep of mudflat show, and when the birds come in to feed.