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North Belfast 's attractions amount to no more than a castle and the city's zoo, both out on the Antrim Road and conveniently alongside one another on the slopes of Cave Hill, served by a welter of buses (#45-#51) from Donegall Square West. Belfast Castle (daily 9am-6pm) and its wooded estate are open to the public. The castle was restored and refurbished in 1990 but, sadly, is virtually empty of Victorian period accoutrements, though the cellars have been redesigned in an attempt to re-create a typical Victorian Belfast narrow street and contain a bar and restaurant. It stands on the former deer park of the Third Marquis of Donegall, whose wish it was for the sandstone castle to be built here to the designs of Lanyon and his associates, in 1870. Consequently, the exterior is in the familiar Scottish Baronial style, inspired in part by the reconstruction of Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire in 1853, with a six-storey tower, a series of crow-stepped gables and conically peak-capped turrets. The most striking feature of all, however, is the serpentine Italianate stairway that leads down from the principal reception room to the garden terrace below. Upstairs a modest visitor centre (daily 9am-6pm; free) is best visited for a look through its remote-controlled camera on the roof. Adjoining the castle is the Bellevue Estate, the old pleasure gardens laid out by the Belfast Street Tramway Company, but functioning since 1934 as Belfast Zoo (daily: April-Sept 10am-5pm; Oct-March 10am-3.30pm, Fri closes 2.30pm; GBP4.90), set in well-landscaped parkland stretching up towards Cave Hill. After a fifteen-year renovation programme and an investment of GBP10 million it's looking less like an animal prison. Within, you'll find spider monkeys, Malayan tapirs, penguins and sea lions, and a free flight aviary, where rare species have room to breed. Castle and zoo aside, though, it's Cave Hill itself that should be your target in the area. Several paths lead up from the castle estate to the hill's summit - a rocky outcrop known as "Napoleon's Nose" - which affords an unsurpassable strategic overview of the whole city and lough. From here you can't help but appreciate the accuracy of the poet Craig Raine's aerial description of the city in his Flying to Belfast : like "a radio set with its back ripped off". Cave Hill was once awash with Iron Age forts, for there was flint (for weapon-making) in the chalk under the basalt hill-coverings. In 1795, Wolfe Tone, Henry Joy McCracken and other leaders of the United Irishmen stood on the top of Cave Hill and pledged "never to desist in our efforts until we have subverted the authority of England over our country and asserted our Independence".
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