Ballintoy Harbour

Ballintoy is a tiny working harbour at the foot of a switchback single-track road, surrounded by a chaos of basalt stacks, skerries and rock pools — Game of Thrones fans will know it as Pyke. For a drone it's a gift: tight, textured coastline that looks dramatic even at 30 m, the white church on the hill above, Sheep Island offshore and Rathlin on the horizon. The harbour and car park are publicly accessible and council-maintained, which matters here because the National Trust owns much of the surrounding coast — Carrick-a-Rede is just over a kilometre east and Larrybane's chalk quarry sits between — and the Trust does not permit TOAL from its land. Launch and land at the harbour, and treat NT clifftops as camera subjects, not landing zones. Timing is everything: tour coaches and camper vans jam the tiny car park from late morning through afternoon in season, so go at dawn or in the off-season. Sheep Island holds breeding seabirds — give it a wide berth from April to July. Wind funnels and gusts hard around the headlands, so this is a good-conditions-only site.