The Maritime Trail—Boatbuilding history galore—The Titanic Museum

September 19, morning.

Walking along the Maritime Trail is one of the best ways to see the history of Belfast’s working harbour.

It runs along the river Lagan and contains views of life along the water.
A plan of the Titanic Quarter of Belfast’s Maritime Trail. A Maritime Trail sign explaining the influence of Harland and Wolf’s (H & W) shipyard on Belfast’s shipbuilding industry.
The ‘Caisson’, a type of lock used to open and close the area where the larger ships were built.
Notes about how the ‘Caisson’ worked. 
The Maritime Trail culminates at the Titanic Museum.
The entire walk was full of marine history and by the time we reached the Titanic museum we were on information overload.
We wandered inside and looked around the gift shop but the high admission (£17 pp) put us off.
Besides, a friend of ours, a self-admitted Titanic ‘groupie’, told us he had been disappointed in the museum as it was more about the famine than the Titanic.
Behind the museum the trail carried on a short way. Here is Al standing at the prow of the Titanic ‘floor plan’.
From this point we could see several of the iconic yellow H & W cranes.
A poster on a Belfast wall showing featuring a H & W crane, saying “seeds grow in the cupped hands of patient children and shoot from inside pockets out of sleeves and collars”.

• More on our 2015 trip to Ireland.