Belfast is both fascinating and daunting. It’s a place where the echoes of prolonged violence and terrible suffering on both sides of the religious and political divide are almost deafening.

On the weekend I decided to check out the city, I ignored the foul weather and took a cab up the Protestant, Shankhill Road and the parallel-running Catholic domain of Falls Roads. The route is cynically known by the locals as the “Bombs ’n Bullets” tour in reference to the fact that the voilence has subsided a lot since the last big public bomb here when the oft-blasted Hotel Europa was shattered in 1993.

Everyone you meet will have seen, heard or feared kneecappings, bomb-blasts or terrorism. Their descriptions are up-front and personal, to the extent that people almost seem blasé about the whole deal. There is something stark and hard about the streets around the Falls Road and Shankhill Road. On both sides of the massive steely “Peace Wall” betwixt Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods there is a drab poverty and depression which belies the stark differences in each side’s passionate beliefs.

Their vivid murals are raw power — the message leaping from its grey surroundings in the form of a shout, a scream or sometimes even a song. My driver Paul was brought up Catholic, but didn’t much care for the issues which surrounded the Troubles anymore.

“Most people in Belfast don’t,” he said. “It’s only a few who are still really committed to some sort of struggle or war.” Paul was brilliant. For £30 he drove me around the city for hours and answered my questions at length. But it was the story he told so matter-of-factly when I asked about the Troubles, that burns brightest in my memory.

“My mate was known to some people from the other side, and when they burst into his house with guns he was in bed with his girlfriend. They all had the ski-masks and she started screaming because she knew what they were going to do and she threw herself across him,” he said.

“They threw her off and told him to cover his face with the sheet. He said ‘If you’re going to shoot me as I lie in my bed, then you’ll see what you’re doing.’ He wouldn’t cover his face, so they shot him.”

After that story, the streets by the Peace Wall made an appropriately grim backdrop to my thoughts. The streets are narrow and the houses small. Many buildings, especially pubs, and in particular the IRA headquarters where Gerry Adams still drops by for his mail, are heavily fortified with steel cages around entrances, security cameras, ironclad doors and even huge boulders on the footpath to stop anyone parking their potentially explosive vehicles too close.

But their measly defences seemed commonplace after we drove past police stations bristling with cameras, mostly windowless and steel-caged to stop Molatov cocktails bursting against the towering walls. British troops are off the streets of Belfast as of last year, but the Royal Ulster Constabulary never leave home unless it’s in armoured transport.

Over 90 per cent of the RUC — the Northern Ireland branch of British police force — are loyalist Protestants, which according to Paul, has led to sometimes brutal discrimination against Catholics. To be fair, an RUC spokeswoman said that since the first time the religious background of police applicants was measured in 1990, more Catholics were joining.

“What we like to say is that before the ceasefire Catholics didn’t want to join because their own people wouldn’t let them,” says Jean Brown. New British Equal Opportunity regulations dictate that police interviewers may no longer mention an applicant’s religion when considering them for a job.

My last port of call with Paul was the magnificent old Crown Saloon in the town centre, where huge booths with carved wooden walls, known as “snugs,” were the perfect place to get roaring drunk with a group of friends — which is exactly what I did.

It’s here that you may well hear a mixture of Belfast accents, which are probably distinguishable to the Irish, but to foreigners they just sound magnificent. Try getting through a big drinking weekend in Belfast without imitating it badly and you’re either spiritually dead or Irish yourself, yourself to be sure. Sorry.

The next morning dawned bright, cold and clear and I found myself in a wild, free place where the wind was fresh and the brooding, dark green mountains towered over the city

Belfast, with a few inevitable exceptions for a city its size, is extraordinarily beautiful. With only 600,000 or so people in Greater Belfast and less than 200,000 in the inner city areas, there’s a nice townish feel to the place.

Queen’s University ensures a lively atmosphere and there are a number of extremely varied nightlife options. You can find restaurants serving most types of food and it’s cheaper than anything in London and tastes fresher too.

Airfares to Belfast are pretty cheap with short-term deals the best way to do it. So what are you waiting for?