The Dark Hedges are not easy to find. You must follow a serpentine road along a bucolic stretch of Northern Ireland, past sheep and glens and yellow fields of rapeseed until somewhere between the sleepy towns of Ballycastle and Ballymoney — if you keep your eyes peeled and your foot off the gas pedal — you spot a shadowy lane flanked by centuries-old beech trees. These are the Dark Hedges. Their sinewy branches twist toward the sky like the many arms of the Indian goddess Durga. The highest boughs stretch across the lane to the trees on the opposite side, their leaves overlapping, eclipsing the sun. Locals say this place is haunted by a solitary ghost known as the Grey Lady.

But lately she’s had company.

“No one ever used to come here,” said David McAnirn, a tour guide, on a rare balmy June morning. “Now hundreds come each day.”

The reason for the deluge? It was written on the T-shirts of a handful of tourists snapping photos amid the Hedges: “Game of Thrones.”

Chronicling a war among dynasties for an Iron Throne in the imaginary land of Westeros, the HBO fantasy series is a cult hit suffused with intrigue, sex and moody landscapes. The latter is making Northern Ireland a magnet for fans who want to visit places like the Dark Hedges, which appear in the premiere of Season 2 when Arya Stark, a noble girl masquerading as a boy, flees in a cart from her enemies. Or Cushendun, the rocky beach where, later in that season, the priestess Melisandre gives birth in a cave to a supernatural assassin.

The Northern Ireland Tourist Board has been enticing viewers to visit these and other splendors with a “Game of Thrones” filming locations guide on its blog (“Explore the real world of Westeros”) and promotions for “Game of Thrones” exhibitions last spring at the Ulster Museum and at Titanic Belfast. After all, a film or television series can raise a country’s profile. New Zealand has “Lord of the Rings.” Sweden has “Wallander” and “Millennium.” But the success of “Game of Thrones,” which begins filming Season 4 this month in Northern Ireland, is particularly welcome and poignant in the capital, Belfast, which for decades had been synonymous with strife.

More than 3,500 people were killed in the sectarian fighting between British loyalists (mainly Protestants) and Irish nationalists (mostly Roman Catholics) between 1969 and the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998. The rest of the world, including people in other parts of Ireland, stayed away.

In the mid-1990s, tourism industry pioneers like Caroline McComb, who along with her husband operates McComb’s tours and coaches, were scratching their heads trying to figure out how to convince tourists that there was more to Belfast than the Troubles, as the 30-year period of fighting is known. “New York has its skyline,” McComb said. “Sydney has its opera house. Everybody was deflated and was like, ‘What do we have here?’”

These days, a lot. There’s the year-old Titanic Belfast museum, which tells the story of how Belfast once built the biggest ship in the world; the recently restored S.S. Nomadic, an original tender ship to the Titanic that transported the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Elizabeth Taylor; and the new visitor center at the Giant’s Causeway, a UNESCO world heritage site. Belfast has also been courting the world with high-profile events like the MTV Europe Music Awards in 2011, the summit of Group of Eight industrial nations this year and, in 2014, the Giro d’Italia, one of professional cycling’s three Grand Tour races.

“It’s a real breath of fresh air to be able to look forward instead of back,” said McComb, who recently began proffering a private nine-hour “Game of Thrones” locations tour (about $516 a person), available through Viator.com. “People in Northern Ireland are all so eager to make tourism work for us.”

That’s not to say the past is buried. This is a country of ghosts. Crumlin Road Gaol sits like a mausoleum across the street from a derelict courthouse not far from Shankill Road, the main artery through a loyalist, predominantly Protestant working-class neighborhood that was at the center of the Troubles.

Flash forward to June 2013. Women in stilettos are gabbing in front of the former parcel office where prisoners used to collect their mail. There are men in suit jackets where a “movement officer” once logged the whereabouts of prisoners. Waiters weave through the crowd offering finger food with names designed to make a “Game of Thrones” fan grin (“Ned Stark’s venison burgers,” “Joffrey’s cheese and onion tarts”).

This smorgasbord, for journalists and die-hard fans of the series, was arranged by the Northern Ireland Tourist Board and Northern Ireland Screen, a government-backed agency for the film and television industry. It was a celebration of the opening of the final leg of a traveling exhibition of “Game of Thrones” props: swords, crowns, costumes and a severed head (sorry, Stark devotees).

Standing before the crowd — including “Game of Thrones” actors like Maisie Williams (who plays Arya Stark), Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran Stark) and John Bradley (Samwell Tarly) — Peter Robinson, the province’s unionist first minister, said of Northern Ireland: “This is Westeros!”