Today, we set out to explore Winterfell castle and partake of exciting medieval activities like archery and falconry! It’s consistently rainy and foggy in Winterfell in Game of Thrones, and that definitely held true today. I don’t know why I expected anything else.
It was also the day I fell in love with the automatic windshield wipers on the van, which adjusted speed based on the amount of water on the windshield. Now, if only it had a backup cam…
We left our hotel with charming packed picnic lunches from our hostess and set off on our rainy way to Castle Ward, filming location of Winterfell. Other filming locations from the first three seasons dot the castle grounds around Castle Ward, many within walking distance of the castle itself.
Another day, another set of winding, narrow Irish roads. I pity the fools who have to drive behind our slow as hell seven seater people mover. I’m still mainly unaware of the entire left side of the van, but I’m not exhausted today and I didn’t veer too close to the left or drive us over any curbs, so I’ll take that.
The castle itself is located within a huge park, which sits on about 1000 acres of land. It’s dotted with historic homes and their pristine gardens that were fit to feature on an HGTV series (“My rainy Irish estate”), and, of course, castle ruins. All of it is publicly maintained by a large team of groundskeepers.
Even on a rainy day like today (all the Irish folks we talk to keep insisting it’s “not even that bad today”), there are lots of folks hiking or running on the many trails.
We were here for Winterfell, filming locations, local facts…and most importantly, meeting two of the direwolves that were in the show! The dogs who played Summer and Greywind (real names Thor and Odin) were locally-raised. They were selected as puppies and trained by the same person who trained animals in Harry Potter. A nice deal for the owner, really, since his dogs came back perfectly trained!
Summer so soft 
Stretchy boi 
Puppy smooches
Their owner was an extra in many of the scenes, and many of his family members were extras or had on-screen parts in the show as wildlings or northmen in the battle scenes. The show had brought a lot of income to the area for the first few seasons, and tourism to the filming locations has been strong ever since.
After dog petting time, it was time for filming facts and archery! We got a lesson in how they had transformed the castle we see today into Winterfell. The current castle isn’t really big, so they added parts of a different castle in Scotland (Dune Castle, unrelated to the science fiction books and decidedly lacking in dunes) into the background to create something more majestic.
Clock tower, which was repeated many times in the CGI castle 
We donned our cloaks and other medieval garb and headed out for our archery lesson. The last time I had shot a bow was high school gym class. This was decidedly much more cool, especially since I was wearing a cloak. I managed to hit the target every time and didn’t end up snapping myself in the face with the bow string. Yeah!
Firing some arrows 
We hit stuff and not each other! 
Heated accuracy competition
The rain began to get serious after we changed back into our normal rain gear and out of the cloaks. We were off on a walk around the park grounds. The wind off the coast was pretty chilly and it was raining hard, but that didn’t dampen our spirits (and the guide kept insisting that the rain wasn’t that bad and has, in fact, been worse before).
Our first stop on the coast was a boat house that was owned by the Ward family. The Ward estate got bigger and bigger as they kept buying the neighbors’ homes until they eventually had a massive estate all to themselves. As you do.
Shortly after the boathouse, we stopped to view a spot that had been in a scene where the captive Jaime and Brienne had docked their boat.
The more iconic spot on the nearby trail was a tree where Brienne and Jaime had run into three hanged bodies, nicknamed Brienne’s branch. This spot was extra-enjoyable for its lack of rain.
The park hosts lots of farmland. Farmland makes excellent battlefields – many battle scenes were filmed in the nearby fields. They tried to re-use the fields as much as possible by changing filming angles to create a variety of different scenes. Now, of course, sheep and cows and tourists are the only ones in the fields, not fake dead bodies or tents or cameras.
Our last film location stop was Audleys castle, which overlooked the area where the Twins was CGId across the river, and the castle was the site of a few more scenes. The rain stopped momentarily – hooray! We were able to take a very damp picture.
The Twins was added across the river here 
Audleys castle
Our path back to Winterfell took us around Temple Water, which was an artificially-made pond. The OG Lady Ward had a temple-like tea room built on top of a hill overlooking the pond (as you do) so she could watch boats on the pond water and have her tea.
Tea Temple 
View from the end of the pond straight to the castle
Last but not least on our medieval activities list….falconry! We got to hold a beautiful hawk and barn owl. They were gorgeous birds. I fed the hawk a really tiny raw chick leg. Ahh!
Their keeper mentioned that the barn owl would likely vanish from Britain soon as their habitat kept getting destroyed. Poor things. It was a beautiful owl.
In the end, we decided we were too wet to picnic within the castle grounds. The rain had defeated us. We took our lunches back to the Cuan and decided to picnic in the pub instead. It was warm and dry. Yessss.
Our next destination was a small guesthouse in Ballycastle, about 2 hrs north of our current location. It’s near the Giant’s Causeway and other beautiful things on the northern coast. Most of the road to get there was surprisingly wide freeway…until we got closer to our location.
Our guesthouse is located up a pitch-dark one lane roadway which started out with a hilarious sign warning you that the road was narrow. Uh, doesn’t that apply to every road in this country?!