Visiting the Seven Kingdoms (Belfast 2)
This year we went to Belfast for a Game of Thrones extravaganza! The plan was to stay in the City but venture out to all of the TV series locations we could find, firstly with a guided tour and then out on our own!
In the second part of my blog on Belfast I am going to talk about the South East of Northern Ireland, namely visiting Castle Ward and the filming locations that surround it. We had booked to do archery with ClearSky Outdoor Activities, who said that we would be doing the activity in exactly the same spot Bran had been taught by his elder brothers in episode 1 of the first season!
They had a couple of packages for the archery. The Bran package was a 45 minute archery lesson, and dress up in Game of Thrones 'Stark' costumes, (£25 each) and then the Ned package was similar but you get the place to yourself and also more arrows (£95 for upto 3 people). As we were booking out of season, we had no choice but to go for the Ned package.
We arrived at 11am and the first thing we did was change into our costumes! They look pretty good when on and you also get to pick which sword you'd like to carry! I picked 'Longclaw' of course, whereas Katie picked 'Ice'. We were then shown to the archery range and taught how to hold the bow, how to find out your dominant eye and which arm to use! We where then allowed to take some practice shots. Our instructor Fred was really fun and a good teacher. All throughout the day, he gave us helpful tips about where to go to find the filming locations and really went out of his way.
You can see us both practising our archery in the video below and see who won the competition!
I really enjoyed the archery and I wasn't too bad at it either. You have to try and get a cluster of arrows near the middle target and I seemed to be able to do this! It must be all the Xbox I play!!
Archery at Winterfell (Castle Ward)
There are several filming locations within the grounds of Castle Ward. After the archery we went and searched these out. The first one we found was where Brienne and Jaime come ashore and encounter the 3 Stark men who have killed 3 tavern women and hung them on trees. We found the tree that Brienne tied Jaime to, and also the tree the women were tied to, so that was pretty impressive!
We also found the location for Robb Stark's camp when he was stationed outside the Twin's in Season 2. They have inserted the twins using CGI but you can still see where the camp was filmed as Robb and Catelyn look at the two towers from afar. On the title photo on the blog you can see where Robert Baratheon's entourage entered Winterfell too, so there is certainly a lot to review.
You can find out all the details about the tours on their website;
