“It’s all the same soil,” says Ciara Ohartghaile, co-founder and baker at Ursa Minor Bakehouse & Cafe. I’m on a visit to Ballycastle, a gorgeous seaside town on Co Antrim’s north coast. In the course of a conversation about food politics and community with Ciara and her husband Dara Ohartghaile, also co-founder and baker at the Ursa Minor Bakehouse & Cafe, I realise I’m talking to two Irish food heroes.
“I believe wholeheartedly in an island-wide food collective,” I later read on Ciara’s award-winning Substack food blog, Gorse. “The land we farm and grow on knows no politics.”
I’ve found my new favourite food destination in Ireland. So why did it take me 10 years to get here?
Ursa Minor Bakehouse & Cafe began as a pop-up in 2014 after Ciara and Dara returned home from New Zealand with a mission to pour their hearts and souls into baking. This exceptional bakery, complete with a sit-down cafe and shop, started as a market stall in Ballycastle in 2014. Their first premises opened in 2015, and then they found their current home on the main street of Ballycastle in 2017. There’s also a smaller premises, Ursa Minor Minor, in the village of Ballintoy, on the road between Ballycastle and the Giant’s Causeway.
RM Block
The latest star in the Ursa Minor constellation is the Bakery School located across the road at Yarn, a new multipurpose creative space and community hub in the heart of the town founded by Ballycastle native Conor McCaughan and co-designed with his sister-in-law, the arts producer and programmer Susanna Lagan. The building they have transformed was a bank and a wool exchange in previous times. The name Yarn is a nod to the history of local sheep farmers gathering here to trade fleece.
At Yarn there is a high-ceilinged performance and rehearsal space, as well as a garden and five beautifully appointed suites and rooms to stay in starting from £130 per night. There are gigs, summer schools for teens, skateboarding classes, gardening workshops, film clubs and comedy festivals all lined up for the coming months, and their inaugural Artist in Residence programme starts this October.
There is a queue on the Saturday morning I visit Ursa Minor Bakehouse & Cafe, filled with the fizzy buzz of expectation – and touch of anxiety – that comes with being in a queue for the best bread in town. Will the laminated pastry with woodruff and vanilla creme pat, rhubarb compote and fresh Irish strawberries crunchy Irish oat crumble and lilac (yes, that’s all on the one bun) be gone by the time I get to the top of the queue? What if the ’nduja bear claw sells out? Is there enough sourdough for us all?
The display of goodies that the queue drools over changes with the time of day. Before noon it’ll be breakfast delights, and around lunchtime you’ll start to see little brioche buns stuffed with local egg salad, and sourdough sandwiches with their favourite seasonal and local ingredients. As the sign outside the door says, “life can’t get any butter than this” – best read in an Antrim accent.
Despite the appetite for their produce, the vibe is consistently calm and organised in Ursa Minor on a very busy Saturday morning. Coffee is from Established Coffee in Belfast, and it’s exquisite. While queuing we have time to peruse the Irish produce in the shop. We pick up some stunning raw milk goat’s cheese called Cnoc Liatroma from Leitrim Hill Creamery and a packet of delicious Rose Veal Coriander Salami from Broughgammon Farm, just a 10-minute drive away, to have with our Country Loaf sourdough after a swim at Dunseverick rock pools later in the day.
“My mission is better food for everyone,” says Ciara. “I want to gently educate people about food and our food history through the seasonal ingredients we use.”
All of their bread is naturally leavened sourdough, free from commercial yeast, additives and preservatives. They use organic white flour alongside speciality stone-ground flour, produced in the UK and Ireland, including Manna Mill from Turlough Keenan in Co Monaghan, Oak Forest Mills from Kilkenny and Dunany Mill in Co Louth.
It’s this meticulous attention that makes them a stand-out. Even their Viennoiserie pastry is slow fermented over three days, specifically made that way to increase the flavour, texture and digestibility – it doesn’t make your tummy scrunch into a ball of protest after eating it.
Ciara and Dara are members of the Real Bread Ireland network, whose mission is to create a legal definition for sourdough bread.
Ciara’s brother Rory Friers is guitarist and founding member of iconic Northern Irish instrumental rock band And So I Watch You From Afar. “I learned from my brothers in the music scene in the North to be encouraging of the food community, instead of being in competition. We should be working together supporting good food, island wide, to promote better food for our people,” she says. This ethos defines how Ciara and Dara lead their team of 17 bakers and baristas; this is community at its best.
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Learn from Visit these food heroes in the cafe or make a weekend of it by booking a course in the Bakery School and a stay at Yarn. Peruse Ballycastle’s adorable antique shops (I got a teapot that looks like a cat for £10) and pop into Stewart’s, a locally run sports and swimwear shop, which does a great line in wetsuits. For fish and chips, it’s got to be Mortons on the Pier, a fish and chip takeaway that has been in the Morton family for more than 100 years on Ballycastle Pier.
An unmissable experience when in the area is to catch a ferry to Rathlin Island from Ballycastle Pier and make your way to the West Light Seabird Centre, which is home to Northern Ireland’s largest seabird colony. Puffins, kittiwakes, guillemots and corncrakes all nestle together along the cliffs near the lighthouse from late April through to early August.
Just a 10-minute drive away, you can visit the thoroughly inspiring Broughgammon Farm’s shop and cafe, where you’ll find a forward-thinking family farm run by Becky Gray and Charlie Cole specialising in rearing ethical meat such as cabrito kid goat, rose veal, pasture-raised pork, lamb, and chicken’s eggs. They have their own artisan on-site butchery, regenerative grown vegetables in their fields and two polytunnels, and host a full programme of gorgeous events year round such as their farm-to-fork supper clubs, foraging walks, and cheesemaking classes.
Less than 20 minutes’ drive west of Ballycastle is Bushmills, home of the famous whiskey, and also home to Maedgen, an utterly charming cheesemonger’s and food shop run by Emma and Jo. Maegden is an old English word for maiden, and that’s how the name is pronounced.
All of my favourite food heroes stock their shelves, nestled next to so many new products to discover and explore. Their grilled cheese toasties are legendary – for good reason: they’re perfect. Maedgen hot chocolate’s reputation precedes it, and exceeds my expectations.
Giant’s Causeway is a must, and it’s a delight to share in the awe sparked by our island’s natural beauty with people from all over the world.
Another 20 minutes down the road west is Harry’s Shack at Portstewart, run by Donal Doherty, and just a little further you’ll find the best of native seafood at Rebekah and Stevie McCarry’s award-winning restaurant, Lir, in Coleraine.
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Even those of us with the most basic grasp of history understand why a conscious or unconscious barrier between North and South lingers. “I’ve seen a map of the UK with Northern Ireland floating off to the left, detached and bizarre, an offshore community, an afterthought,” writes Ciara on her blog. “I’ve even seen the opposite where we’re cut out of the rest of the island. How weird. Does no one else scrunch their face at the madness of it? What has our history, the politics, done to us?”
There’s so much to see and learn in Northern Ireland. Break that invisible barrier by going up the road to see for yourself.
Aoife McElwain stayed as a guest in Yarn, Ballycastle. yarnballycastle.com
