Hills Film and Literature
With its dramatic cliffs, rolling hills and lush wooded valleys, the Belfast Hills have inspired writers and artists for centuries. From Johathan Swift's Gulliver to modern film makers, these summits and slopes so close to a bustling city make for awe inspiring tales of love, the beauty of nature revealed and heartfelt tragedy.
Recently Belfast has been firmly put on the map with all manner of Hollywood stars and directors in town - as well as the established prose and poetry of some of Ireland's most famous writers. Send us any anecdotes, photographs or immortal words that have awakened your literary senses. Sit back, flick through the pages of literature and take a front row seat at the movies.
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"The city rises and falls like music, like breathing… Belfast is Rome with more hills: it is Atlantis raised from the sea." Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street.
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Pearse Elliott was born and went to school in west Belfast beneath Black Mountain. The playwright from the Lenadoon estate was nominated for the Irish Film and Television Best New Talent Award for his 2004 feature film, Man About Dog.
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Shirley Maclaine, Richard Attenborough, Mischa Barton, Christopher Plummer and Pete Postlewait star in one of the latest movies to make it to the big screen, shot at the very place on Belfast's Cave Hill where over 60 years ago was the scene of a Second World War crash that claimed the lives of 10 American bomber pilots.
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This film was shot in Belfast under the ancient Belfast Hills. The movie director is Terry Loan, a local resident of the hills. It's a story of boyhood and friendship as Belfast erupts into conflict in the early 1970s. Adrian Dunbar, Ciaran Hinds (from Limestone Road under Cave Hill) and Julie Walters stars. Cave Hill can be seen in the background of this picture.
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The writer was said to be inspired by the sight of Cave Hill while he was living in Belfast, which resembles a sleeping giant, leading him to pen his most famous work "Gulliver's Travels".
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Born on a farm in County Derry, he studied English at Queen's University in Belfast and has become one of Ireland's most renowned poets, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He penned the poem "The Betrothal of Cave Hill".
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Actor JG Devlin was born on Divis Mountain on January 1, 1907. He was a prolific actor involved in theatre, films, and television for over 60 years. He began his film career in the mid 1980s having already become a household name in his appearances in Z Cars and The Billy Plays starring a young Kenneth Branagh, himself a native of north Belfast.
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Belfast's Lower Donegall Street was used to set the scene for London in the late 1970s for the film Killing Bono. The old buildings of Belfast's Cathedral Quarter re-created the old Whitechapel area in the English capital.
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Odd Man Out starring James Mason, Robert Newton, Cyril Cusack and FJ McCormick was shot on location in Belfast. Though the places are genuine, the film has the dubious reputation for southern, rather than northern dialects!
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This epic 1997 James Cameron film starring Kate Winset and Leonardo DiCaprio raked in 11 Oscars and placed Belfast on the map as the birthplace of the doomed liner. The RMS Titanic pumphouse and other buildings involved in the tragic ship's design and construction can still be visited in the city today.
