The Gobbins
Cliff-path tourist attraction in Northern Ireland
The Gobbins is a cliff-face running from Whitehead to Portmuck Harbour along the eastern coast of Islandmagee, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, on the Causeway Coastal Route. The Gobbins cliff path runs across bridges, past caves and through a tunnel, along The Gobbins cliffs (Irish: Gobán meaning 'tip/point of land' or 'headland'). The cliffs are recognised for their rich birdlife, important geology and notable species. James Kerr lost his life by falling over the Gobbins cliffs on 11 Jun 1892 aged 14 years when collecting seagull eggs, and he is interred in the nearby Ballypriormore Cemetery.
The Gobbins cliff path was created by an Irish railway engineer called Berkeley Deane Wise. He designed and built the path as a tourist attraction for the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway Company. The path first opened to the public in 1902, with visitors paying 6d to enjoy a 'perfect marvel of engineering'. The Gobbins drew worldwide acclaim, with newspapers declaring that 'the varied beauty of this cliff path baffles all description'.
Thousands of people visited The Gobbins in the first few decades of the 20th century – advertisements of the time declared 'the new cliff path along The Gobbins Cliffs, with its ravines, bore caves, natural aquariums ... has no parallel in Europe as a marine cliff walk'.
“The Gobbins” enters the record as cliff-path tourist attraction in Northern Ireland. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gobbins, Cliff-path and tourist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5575420. Authority coordinates are 54.801, -5.690. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892 and 1902.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Gobbins” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.