1831: The Year Portrush Became a Town
A schoolhouse built in a sandhill dugout, a bell once owned by the Tsar of Russia, and the Methodist minister who gave Portrush its first real building.
A History of Portrush Harbour
From a rocky natural anchorage to a working 19th-century port — shipwrecks, steamships, salmon smacks, and a harbour that changed the town's fortunes.
Anthony Lovell: Portrush's WWII Flying Ace
A Spitfire ace with 22 kills, killed in an accidental crash days after Japan's surrender — the last Irish airman to die in WWII.
Ballywillan National School: A Forgotten Historical Building
The oldest surviving school building in the Portrush area, funded by subscription in 1829, sits quietly in a graveyard most visitors walk straight past.
Barry's Amusements: A Portrush Institution
From a travelling circus family's tent on the Pleasure Grounds to a century-old amusement park — the real story behind Barry's Amusements.
Castle Erin: The Rise and Fall of a Grand Hotel
From a Victorian golf-and-bathing hotel to WWII evacuee housing to a Christian youth hostel — 114 years of one Portrush landmark, demolished in 2006.
Donny May: WWII Hero, Angler and Motorcyclist
He lied about his age to join the Royal Navy at 16, survived D-Day, then spent decades running Portrush hotels — and racing motorbikes on the side.
Easter 1922: A Week in Old Portrush
Electricity finally arrives after a 30-year debate, plus a hockey scandal — one week reconstructed from a 1922 newspaper.
Getting Technical in Portrush
From a single rates vote in 1909 to a purpose-built hotel and catering college — how Portrush built its own hospitality training pipeline.
Hidden Portrush: Curiosities and Unanswered Questions
A stone shaped like a pint of Guinness, an unfinished carving by the RNLI station, and a spring nobody's explained — small mysteries in plain sight.
Last Port of Call for an Old Convict Ship
A Burma-built ship, a floating Australian gold-rush prison, a touring museum of convict horrors — and, possibly, one stop in Portrush before it burned in Ohio.
Memories of Old Portrush
Beach donkeys, excursion trains, and a street of sailors — three family memories of a Portrush that's mostly gone now.
More Myths and Legends of the Causeway Coast
A giantess exhibited to royalty, a pirate who guards buried treasure, and a princess buried under a faded royal crest — more folklore from the Causeway Coast.
Myths and Legends of the Causeway Coast
Finn M'Cool, the Grey Man, and a lake that vanishes — Causeway Coast folklore, and the real events some of it grew from.
Naval Visitors to Portrush Harbour
A Prime Minister's round of golf, a 900-man cruiser crowd-pleaser, and the warship that came back a decade later to sink off Rathlin with 19 lives lost.
Notable People of Portrush
A golfing champion who stopped the town in 1899, the man behind Portrush's grandest shop, and the poet who wrote about a Chinese restaurant on Main Street.
Pantomime in Portrush
From a 1952 church fundraiser to a sold-out modern revival — nearly 70 years of amateur pantomime, with a 20-year gap in the middle.
Placenames of the Causeway Coast
What Dunluce, Ramore, and Portrush actually mean — the Irish-language roots behind the names on every road sign along this coast.
Portrush and the Railway
From a single 1855 platform to a station with the world's tallest longcase clock — how the railway built modern Portrush.
Portrush as an Emigration Port
Long overshadowed by Coleraine in the historical record, Portrush's waters saw named ships sail for colonial America and beyond for over a century.
Portrush at War: The Home Front
A secret WRENS listening post feeding Bletchley Park, a 1943 Christmas party thrown by American paratroopers, and the pillboxes still standing on the beach.
Portrush Before Portrush
Long before the seaside resort: a Bronze Age village, a possible early medieval royal capital, and a 1580 spy map of the promontory.
Portrush's Forgotten Roller Skating Craze
A £4,352 rink with 20,000 square feet of maple floor, open just four years before the fashion moved on — one of Edwardian Portrush's shortest-lived attractions.
Portrush's Musical Heritage
The Arcadia Ballroom was called 'The Ballroom of Romance.' The Undertones played there a week before Teenage Kicks. A genuine North Coast music story.
Portrush's Steamer Days: The Scotch Boats
For decades, purpose-built steamers linked Portrush to Glasgow — a service that ended in 1914 and never really came back.
Regattas of Yesteryear
From an 1837 rowing race with printed prize lists to a purpose-built sailing club in 1907 — seven decades of organised regattas on Portrush's bay.
Royal and Famous Visitors to Portrush
A future US President, a Brazilian Emperor, two royal visits from the Queen, and a runaway hot air balloon — Portrush has had some unlikely famous guests.
Saving Lives at Sea: The Portrush Lifeboat
A dinner-party favour that became a 160-year institution — the history of the Portrush RNLI lifeboat, and the dramatic 1960 rescue that tested it.
Saving Ramore Head and the Skerries
A quarried-away hilltop, a secret WWII listening post linked to the hunt for the Bismarck, and a century of development schemes that never quite happened.
Sea Caves of the Causeway Coast
A ghost that sweeps a tower nightly, a drowned musician still heard inland, and a real 1896 visit from the father of modern cave science.
Storms That Shaped Portrush
Local fishermen saved the harbour fleet from Hurricane Debbie in 1961; a flash flood swamped Dhu Varren the year before — two storms, told by eyewitnesses.
Street Gambling Led to a Riot
Roulette tables were a familiar summer sight on Edwardian Main Street — until a lost bet in 1913 turned into a full street fight and four arrests.
Take a Dose of Portrush: The Doctor Who Prescribed the Town Itself
A 1900 medical conference, a fake worm extraction, and the GP who co-founded Portrush's hospital — the real Doc Martin of Portrush.
Taking the Plunge: A History of Sea Bathing in Portrush
Segregated bathing places, a woman who swam from the Causeway to Portrush in under four hours, and the Bath Street names that still mark where it all happened.
Tales from the Old Harbour
A revenge brawl fought with paving stones wrapped in wool stockings, and a 12-year-old's account of a sailor lost overboard — two stories from the age of sail.
The Causeway Case: When They Tried to Fence Off the Giant's Causeway
In 1896 a syndicate tried to charge admission to the Giant's Causeway. The public fight that followed ended up in a Dublin courtroom — with a surprising result.
The Devereux Shipwreck
A Victorian timber barque wrecked at Whiterocks in 1864, buried for over a century, then fully exposed by the 2022 storms that stripped the beach bare.
The Earliest Known Map of Portrush
A hand-drawn 1580s map shows a Portrush of thatched cottages, a defensive ditch, and an armed English ship — two centuries before the Ordnance Survey.
The Giant's Causeway Tramway: A History
How two brothers, Lord Kelvin, and the Siemens family built the world's first long-distance hydroelectric tramway between Portrush and the Giant's Causeway.
The Golden Age of the Portrush Season
For 42 years, one man built a summer programme that drew 18,000 people to a single fireworks display — the story of Captain Shutt and Ramore Hill's heyday.
The Guides of the Giant's Causeway
For 150 years, Causeway guides greeted every visitor — some harassed, some genuinely brilliant. The story of the trade, its characters, and the 'Guides' War'.
The Harbour That Almost Was
A £100,000 Victorian plan to turn the Skerries into a naval refuge harbour — approved by Parliament, then quietly abandoned. What if it had gone ahead?
The History of Golf at Royal Portrush
A grip still used today, an Open champion who caddied here as a boy, and the club that hosted golf's oldest Major outside Scotland and England.
The Portrush Merman
A Victorian newspaper hoax about a sea-monster at the Blue Pool went viral by 1870s standards, reprinted as far away as New Zealand.
The Rocks That Made Portrush Famous
A 19th-century scientific controversy fought out on the Portrush foreshore — and the fossil-packed white cliffs blasted through by an ancient volcano.
The Skerries: Portrush's Own Island Chain
A pirate legend, a lost French treasure chest, and a family of fishermen who painted the navigation beacon by hand — the story of the 17 islands off Portrush.
The Story Behind Rodney Street
Why one Portrush street has a name found almost nowhere else in Northern Ireland — a 1930 battleship visit, a storm, and a shopping week.
To War with a Typewriter: Ernie Sandford's Extraordinary Career
A Portrush grocer's son who reported D-Day from a bomber, ran Reuters' Paris office, and wrote one of Northern Ireland's most enduring guidebooks.
When Portrush Governed Itself
80 years of local self-rule, 26 chairmen, and the woman believed to be the first female council chairman in Ireland.