Magheramorne is a tiny hamlet on the A2 between Carrickfergus and Larne. My dad (not pictured) was from Magheramorne and my granny was born and lived there her whole life (also not pictured) well into the 1990s in a two room weaver style cottage. Magheramorne only has about 70 people living in it and there are still several McKintys around those parts. I spent quite a bit of my childhood in Magheramorne and a few years ago when I heard that a new HBO show Game of Thrones was filming in Magheramorne I was pretty excited. Before the show debuted my little brother and I had a gander around the sets that had been built in the old Magheramorne quarry. If you know the show you'll know that Castle Black is there and the Great Wall of Westeros. When we went there no one had heard of Game of Thrones and the sets had zero security. That has all changed of course and now you can go on many different Game of Thrones tours in Northern Ireland (the place where most of the show is filmed)....
Game of Thrones won the Emmy Award for best drama last year and without doubt the best episode of the entire season was Hardhome (pictured) which also was entirely filmed in Magheramorne but this time on a set built on the shores of Larne Lough to simulate a village up in the polar regions of Westeros. While Jon Snow is up there trying to persuade the Wildings that they should flee south of the wall the village of Hardhome is attacked by the Night King and an army of the undead in a scene that left me and everyone else watching gasping in horror for 15 minutes. The very end of the scene is a Leone style staring contest between Jon Snow and the Night King and is probably the best things Thrones has done since season 3's The Red Wedding. The only weird thing about that scene is the fact that they filmed it exactly where my little brother and I used to go swimming as little kids and its where my dad used to swim across Larne Lough to Islandmagee every Sunday to visit his Granny McKee (my great grandmother). This (the final bit) looks like a scary situation but I assure you that safety from the White Walker army is only a three hundred metre swim away in the village of Mill Bay in Islandmagee.
