Northern Ireland : Mention Ulster and most Americans think of terrorist bombs and British tanks. But in Belfast and beyond, a native daughter finds a surprisingly peaceful world and one of the best-kept secrets in travel.

I knew they were American tourists the moment they walked into breakfast in his-and-hers Aran sweaters and loafers, she clutching a copy of a Birnbaum guide to her bosom.

My husband and I were staying at The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn, a thatched 16th-Century coach house in County Down, Northern Ireland, 10 miles from Belfast. As the couple dug into their “Ulster fry”--eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes, soda and potato bread--we asked what had brought them to this chunk of the United Kingdom, about the size of Connecticut.

The day before, Robert and Cynthia Stedeford, real estate brokers from Atlanta, had driven north from Dublin, in tense silence.

“Cynthia was so terrified at the idea of coming up North that she refused to talk to me,” admitted Robert.

“I expected to be surrounded by tanks and guns as soon as we crossed the border,” Cynthia explained, “but all we found were wide-open motorways with hardly anybody on them and everything looking neat and prosperous. We couldn’t believe how much cleaner and more orderly everything was than in Southern Ireland.”

The Stedefords had discovered one of Europe’s best secrets, an area whose No. 2 industry was tourism until the 1970s, when the nightly news and daily papers bombarded the world with the images of a territory at war. Today, 25 American tourists visit the Republic of Ireland to the south for every one that comes North.

I was going North, but I was by no means a disinterested observer. As a native daughter, I had taken the well-worn path of the immigrant to North America almost 25 years before. American friends, on hearing I was Irish, invariably said, “Oh, I’ve been to Ireland many times,” but they had never been to My Ireland.

I understood their reluctance to visit anywhere they perceived as troubled, but I had always felt their fears were unjustified. Friends and relatives in Northern Ireland had told me how little their day-to-day lives were affected by the political struggles. Now I was about to put my money where my mouth was and see for myself.

Passengers flying to Belfast (a one-hour trip from London’s Heathrow or Gatwick airports) share terminal space with those going to Israel on El Al airlines, so there is eagled-eyed security, which gives one a fine sense of comfort. Surprisingly, there was no obvious armed presence at Belfast’s Aldergrove Airport, and the atmosphere was that of a busy international airport anywhere.

Driving around the province, I quickly discovered what the more adventurous tourist already knows: Northern Ireland is a throwback to the good old days of European travel. A traffic jam is three cars at a stoplight; the fine, wind-swept beaches are among the most underpopulated in the world, and golfers at the more than 60 courses have never heard of waiting to tee off (in fact, one stretch of the North Antrim Coast has seven courses within 10 miles, among them the Royal County Down, which an American golf magazine rated one of the 10 most beautiful in the world). The rivers and lakes are clear, unpolluted, teeming with trout and salmon and under-fished, and there are eight yacht clubs within a 30-mile drive of Belfast alone. And in these days of the weak American dollar, Northern Ireland is a good 30% cheaper than the South or the rest of Britain.

Considering its image abroad, it may surprise many to learn that the city of Belfast is Europe’s safest capital, at least according to a 1989 report by the U.K.’s British Home Office, whose crime statistics included terrorist acts. I felt safe walking the streets at any hour. Yes, a visitor will catch sight of the occasional British armored car, or soldier armed with an automatic weapon patrolling the sidewalk, but civilian crime is far lower than any U.S. city.

And there is ample reason for Americans to visit Ulster. The ties that bind the province to the United States are strong. When John F. Kennedy became President, much was made of his (southern) Irish ancestry. But many Americans may not realize that there have been no fewer than 14 Presidents whose families emigrated from Northern Ireland. There is an Ulster-American heritage trail that includes the ancestral home sites of many of America’s Presidents, including Andrew Jackson (at Carrickfergus), Ulysses S. Grant (just outside Dungannon) and Woodrow Wilson (near Strabane). All are open to the public. Other prominent Ulster-American families include the Gettys, the Mellons and the Armours, to say nothing of that other distinguished American son of Ulster, Horace Greeley, who popularized the phrase “Go west young man.”

Belfast is a city much changed since I knew it in the ‘60s as a rather Puritan provincial place of shipyards and linen mills. Ironically, the devastation in the ‘70s has resulted in a frenzy of revitalization recently. There is construction going on everywhere, and the city center has been transformed into a chic, pedestrian center with banks of flowers and fountains.

Oh sure, in the surrounding districts, the Falls and the Shankill Roads, the marks of sectarian division are still apparent--fortified police stations and graffiti marking Ulster “loyalist” or rival territory of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army’s political wing. But at the city center, everyone meets on the same footing, for entertainment or shopping. Cars are still stopped at checkpoints in and out of the main thoroughfares, handbags are sometimes searched at the entrance to stores and public buildings, but otherwise things are considerably less threatening than in some areas of downtown Los Angeles.

The citizens of Belfast date the revival from the refurbishment of the Grand Opera House in the early ‘80s. A venerable pile, it faced the wrecker’s ball until wiser heads prevailed, and it’s now a gem of Victorian theater architecture. Northern Irish native son Kenneth Branagh premiered his film version of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” there and donated the proceeds to the flourishing local arts scene.

The Belfast Arts Festival, which began as a Queen’s University student effort, is held in the area every October and is now the second biggest in the U.K. after Edinburgh. The Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street still offers the full range of classical theater as well as new plays from local playwrights.

Belfast yuppies have more disposable income than their equivalent “across the water,” and there seem to be more Porsches and BMWs about than in any city in England. On the heels of the shoppers came the restaurants, 300 of them in five years, many of them serving the kind of nouvelle cuisine that would not be out of place in the Napa Valley. There is even a sort of South Coast Plaza of Belfast--the glitzy new steel-and-glass CastleCourt mall, which contains such shops as The Gap and Laura Ashley.

In and around the city, we dined at Culloden House, Craigavad, just outside Belfast, in a Gothic castle once the residence of the Bishops of Down, and in The Old Schoolhouse, which really is a converted village school in Killinchy on the shores of Strangford Lough (lake). And while one can still eat awful food in Northern Ireland, both these restaurants served meals as sophisticated as anything available anywhere in a major metropolitan city. The salmon, the lamb, the duck, the trout and the lobster were all excellent. (Both offered an elegant fixed-price, three-course dinner for $30 to $40 per person.)

Belfast is currently showing off it’s new civic pride to visitors during the yearlong Best of Belfast ’91 Festival, a tourism promotion that officials hope will dispel misconceptions about the city and its inhabitants.

“The violence has become like the Mafia,” one Northern Irish businessman told me. “It’s two rival gangs fighting each other, and when they invade each other’s turf, there’s violence, but the targets are very specific. It doesn’t affect the ordinary person any more than the Mafia in Chicago.”

While Belfast does suffer from a dearth of hotel accommodations--if the tourists weren’t coming neither were the hoteliers--new hotels are opening every year.

During our visit last October, we stayed in the heart of downtown at the legendary Europa Hotel. Because it had been the hotel of choice for journalists covering the strife, it held the dubious distinction in the ‘70s of being the most bombed hotel in the world. When we were there, it seemed to cater mostly to businessmen, and was made hospitable by a friendly young staff who seemed to want to revive the tourist trade all by themselves. Sadly, two weeks ago the hotel was bombed again for the first time in years. Although there were no injuries, the event was followed by even sadder news: the hotel has gone into receivership, although it remains open.

Just across the street from the hotel is the Crown Liquor Saloon, the only pub in Britain owned by the National Trust. But if its recent restoration made the tradition-minded drinking regulars cranky, it also has done much to polish up this jewel of Victorian public house design, made famous in the writings of England’s late poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman, who praised its stained glass, mahogany, marble pillars and pressed tin ceilings. Unfortunately for a California health freak, the atmosphere is so smoky that only the briefest visit during opening hours was possible.

Also worth a visit is Queen’s University, whose beautiful facade is modeled after Magdalen College at Oxford. The surrounding area, Belfast’s Greenwich Village, is full of bookstores, pubs and bistros that make it one of the liveliest corners of the city.

But one shouldn’t linger in Belfast more than a night, because the real joys of Northern Ireland are found just a short drive outside: pristine countryside, emerald-green mountains, chilly loughs and the rugged Atlantic Coast.

The trip to the beautiful Fermanagh lake district in the southwest of the province, for instance, takes just under two hours on new motorways, less than half the time than in the ‘60s. The lakes, the 50-mile stretch of Lough Erne and its tributaries are still a magic realm of misty waters, mountains, deep dark woods and the eerie feeling of living in a fairy-tale land.

It’s possible to hire a cruiser for a week and barely see another boat on what is surely the most uncongested waterway in Europe. The hordes of camera-toting tourists who overrun England’s Lake District in the summer are mercifully absent, so one can visit Devenish Island in mid-lake and brood among the abbey ruins and pre-Christian artifacts, thinking deep thoughts of long-dead saints and scholars without shuffling for elbow room.

We stopped off en route to visit the Tyrone crystal factory at Dungannon, where 19th-Century crystal was made before the more famous Waterford was heard of. Their award-winning table and decorative crystal now blown in a state-of-the-art, $12-million facility is every bit as beautiful as the Southern brand name and--whisper it--considerably cheaper.

We stayed the night in Enniskillen, the bustling town that divides Lough Erne at its narrowest point. It’s noted for its famous regiment, The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (the regiment retained the old spelling of the name), and for its pair of fine Palladian houses, Castlecoole and Florence Court, both owned by the National Trust and open to visitors and both fine examples of how the landed Anglo-Irish gentry lived. Equally well-known is the public school Portora, whose graduates include such disparate writers as Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett.

One could happily spend weeks in the Lakeland, but I was anxious to get back to the sea and my favorite place in all of Ireland--the Antrim Coast, one of the most magnificent coastal drives in the world.

The road from Carrickfergus (10 minutes from Belfast and the site of the Norman castle where the Protestant King William III landed in 1690 to take on the Catholic King James and in so doing split the two Irish communities for 300 years) to Ballycastle in the north is a delight, passing through the wild and romantic region of the Glens of Antrim.

The coastal villages and towns of Ballygally, Carnlough, Cushendall and Cushendun (the entire village is a National Trust preserve) are impossibly picturesque and full of people who are never too busy to stop and partake of the “crack,” which may have sinister connotations in Los Angeles but in Northern Ireland is a ubiquitous term meaning good conversation.

It’s difficult to tear oneself away from the coast, with its pretty small towns grouped around tiny harbors and tranquil bays. But turning inland there are the nine Glens of Antrim--dark, lushly wooded and filled with waterfalls. They are a good place to leave the car and hike back into a world that, until the coming of the roads 150 years ago, was cut off even from the rest of its own country. The area is filled with Irish mythology: fairies, witches, giants and spirits good and evil are said to inhabit the glens.

Treading their bosky depths, coming upon a hidden waterfall or a clearing full of wildflowers, it’s easy to believe that this is an enchanted land, especially since the people inhabiting the occasional villages you come across have a rare affability.

I moved on. If I’d stayed any longer I might have stayed forever.

We ventured along the coast as far as we could while still remaining in the North. In Portstewart, we went to look at Rock Castle Cottages, a collection of new bungalows right on the sea, where the surf pounds against the rocks and one of the world’s most glorious beaches greets you as you open your eyes every morning. They were built with the North American tourist in mind. Alas, the tourists have not come in significant numbers; too bad, since they are missing a treat and a bargain. Modern but with loads of charm--and delightfully cozy-looking--the cottages sleep four and rent from $300 to $700 a week depending on the season.

Now the unpredictable sea, always a fact of Irish life, decided to act up. A gale had blown up quickly out in the Atlantic and the surf was boiling. We sought refuge in our nearby hotel, The Edgewater, which overlooks the sand under the dramatic shadow of the Loretta convent, a forbidding gray castle perched right on top of a storm-tossed cliff, like something out of a Gothic romance. The old place was warm and cozy, but it creaked and pitched like a ship at sea throughout the night.

In the morning, we braved the weather to see the new $2-million visitors center, built by the National Trust, at the Giant’s Causeway. This is one of the world’s most extraordinary geological formations--40,000 pillars of volcanic basalt that have cooled in symmetrical hexagonal shapes. One can walk out across them and view the breathtaking wind-tossed bays they overlook.

Because of the storm, we turned inland for our last night in Northern Ireland and stayed at Blackheath House in the area of Aghadowey near the prosperous commercial town of Coleraine. Blackheath, restored by its present owners Joey and Margaret Erwin, is a fine Georgian country house built by the Earl of Bristol in 1791 for the use of the parish. One resident was Archbishop Alexander, whose wife Cecil wrote the beloved hymns, “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and “There Is a Green Hill Far Away.”

Over drinks around the fire in the red drawing room, before a superb dinner of local salmon, we chatting with fellow guests. I mentioned seeing what someone had penned in the guest book:

“One of Ireland’s best kept secrets--and I hope it stays that way.”

I do, too, in a way. And yet it would be selfish to hope that this most neglected part of Ireland remains known to only a few. The delights are many, the threat small.

Despite years of terror, the Northern Irish are still able to manage a joke about what has become a fact of life. One story sums up the local attitude:

One old Belfast lady, upon hearing an explosion, runs to her next-door neighbor.

“Was that a bomb--or was it thunder?” she asks.

“I’m afraid,” says her good neighbor, “that was a bomb.”

“Oh, thanks be to God,” says the old woman. “I’m powerful afraid of thunder.”

GUIDEBOOK: Northern Ireland

Getting there: British Airways or Dan Air flies to Belfast from both Heathrow and Gatwick airports in London. Fare is about $175.

By car, Belfast is a three-hour drive from the center of Dublin. Take the A1 to Newry, then the M1 to Belfast.

Where to stay: The Europa Hotel, Great Victoria Street, Belfast (reservations through Consort Hotels, 800-223-6764, or dial direct from the United States, 011-44-232-327-000), is right in the center of downtown Belfast. Rates range from about $84 per night on weekends to $175 for a suite.

Other recommended hotels in and around the city:

The Culloden Hotel, 142 Bangor Road, Holywood, County Down (local phone 2-317-5223). Rates are $118-$190, including breakfast. A two-night bed and breakfast package is $140 per person.

The Dunadry Inn, 2 Island Reagh Drive, Templepatrick, County Antrim (phone 8494-32474). Rates start at $105 for a single.

The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn, 15 Main Street, Crawfordsburn, Country Down (phone 247-853255). Rates start at $105 for a single.

Hotels in the surrounding countryside are cheaper and often charming. Among those particularly recommended in the North Antrim area is Blackheath House, 112 Killeague Road, Blackhill, Coleraine, County Londonderry (phone 265-868433). A single is about $44 with breakfast, a double $112.

For longer stays, try Rock Castle Cottages, Portstewart, County Antrim (phone 265-832277; fax 265-53421). Cost is $300-$700 per week depending on season. Cottages sleep four.

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For more information: Contact the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, 276 Fifth Ave., Suite 500, New York 10001, (800) 326-0036 or (212) 686-6250.

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO: Do’s and don’ts for Northern Ireland. L23