Dark Hedges — remarkable tree
Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay

Dark Hedges

  • 2 min read
  • 55.134° N 6.381° W

Interesting facts

  • Wood from two beeches felled by Storm Gertrude in 2016 became ten carved doors, one per episode of Game of Thrones season six, hung in Northern Irish pubs.
  • The trees are European beeches, a species not native to Ireland, and at around 250 years old they have outlived the usual 150 to 200 years of their kind.
  • Because the shallow roots were being crushed by cars and coaches, the avenue was closed to most traffic on 30 October 2017.
  • The Woodland Trust warned that heavy traffic could cut the remaining lifespan of the trees to under twenty years.
  • The avenue gained a Tree Preservation Order in 2004, and a Dark Hedges Preservation Trust was set up in 2009 to look after it.
  • Only about 75 of the original 150 or so trees are thought to survive, as storms and safety felling thin the rows year by year.
  • Besides Game of Thrones, the avenue appeared in the 2017 film Transformers: The Last Knight.

Why it is worth it

Around 1775 James Stuart set out a double row of beech trees along the approach to Gracehill House, the house he had built in the north of County Antrim and named after his wife, Grace Lynd. The idea was simple estate theatre: a grand avenue to impress anyone driving up to the gate. Some two and a half centuries later the planting has become something its maker could not have designed — a tunnel of grey, contorted trunks whose crowns have met and knotted over Bregagh Road, the lane between the villages of Armoy and Stranocum.

What makes the Dark Hedges remarkable is not any single tree but the way age has worked on all of them at once. These are old trees and they show it: limbs thrown out sideways at improbable angles, bark smoothed and folded like elephant hide, roots heaving out of the verges. The avenue runs for about 150 metres and the canopy closes to a corridor some six to ten metres wide, so the light arrives filtered and green in summer, and in winter the bare branches draw a dense black lacework against the sky. Early morning mist, or low sun slanting along the road, shows the shapes best.

The avenue is a survivor as much as a monument. Of roughly 150 beeches planted, about half remain; the Atlantic storms of recent decades — Gertrude, Doris, Arwen, Isha, Eowyn and others — have each taken one, two or three, and the gaps are now part of the picture. The trees had featured in Northern Ireland tourism imagery since the 1990s, but their fame went global after they stood in for the King's Road in Game of Thrones. Local tradition adds a ghost: a Grey Lady said to drift along the avenue at dusk, variously identified as a Stuart daughter, a maid of the house, or a spirit from a long-forgotten graveyard nearby.

Getting there

The Dark Hedges lie on Bregagh Road near Stranocum and Armoy, in the countryside of north Antrim. The nearest town is Coleraine, about 18 km away. The nearest airport is Belfast International (BFS), about 54 km to the south. The avenue itself is best walked on foot, which is also the only way to take in the trees properly.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Northern Ireland 5The Most Beautiful Places in the United Kingdom 154The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the United Kingdom 10The Most Remarkable Trees 19The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232

From the encyclopaedia

The Dark Hedges is an carriage avenue of mature beech trees along Bregagh Road between Armoy and Stranocum in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The trees on both sides of the road are European beech trees, which are not indigenous to Ireland, they meet overhead, growing into a twisted canopy and forming a tree tunnel that is between 6 and 10 metres in width – the avenue is about 150 metres. The Dark Hedges are one of Northern Ireland's most photographed attraction, in the 1990s Northern Ireland started using images from the carriage road in their tourism campaigns. Planted around 1775, the iconic beech trees are roughly 250 years old, surpassing the typical 150-to-200-year life expectancy of common beech trees. The trees are in a state of natural decline and near the end of their lifespan. The tunnel of beech trees shot to international fame when they were filmed on location in the US TV drama Game of Thrones (2011). The Bregagh Road was permanently pedestrianised and closed to general public vehicle traffic since October 2017 to protect the sensitive root systems from vehicle compaction. Around 75 of the original 150 trees remain as of 2026.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

55.13440, -6.38060per Wikidata