Derry-Londonderry

I haven’t been to Derry-Londonderry for a long time. I sometimes thought about going but I didn’t get round to actually going. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go it was just that I never seemed to have a good enough reason to go.

Now in the first sentence I mentioned Derry-Londonderry and many readers not from Northern Ireland (I don’t have many readers but it sounds good) are probably scratching their heads and wondering what I’m going on about with this Derry-Londonderry thing. Put simply and without launching a long winded explanation, Nationalists call the city Derry while Unionists call it Londonderry. If you really must know the background to this then Google is probably the way to go. I think it was Gerry Anderson the Radio Ulster presenter who started calling it Derry stroke Londonderry and then he eventually shortened it to simply stroke city but I’m open to being corrected as always.

Now if you’ve got this far you’ve probably realised that I have very recently been to Derry-Londonderry and because repeating Derry -Londonderry is starting to get silly and to remain even handed, I’ve decided to alternate between the two names while I explain how I got there.

Last year my wife and I were given Hastings Hotels vouchers as a gift from our children. We didn’t get around to using them, to be honest we forgot, until last week. There didn’t seem to be much point in using them to go somewhere just an hours drive away so we looked at the furthest we could go from home and stay in a Hastings Hotel and to the Everglades Hotel in Derry we went.

There was no messing about. We arrived at the hotel, dumped our stuff and walked into the city and straight to the walls. It was warm, I think about 27 or 28 degrees. I know people will say that’s not warm but in Ireland it is – we’re not used to it.

I’m told Derry is the only completely intact walled city in Ireland and one of the finest examples of a walled city in Europe. It is certainly impressive. You are able to walk completely round the walls and it feels strange in places how close buildings outside the walls are to them. A couple of hours playing on the walls, a walk over the Peace Bridge and it was time to get back to the hotel for dinner and Guinness.