The Causeway Coast has more than enough folklore for one page. Here’s a second helping.
Mary Murphy, the Portrush Giantess
Born in Portrush in 1673, Mary Murphy reportedly stood 7’2” — remarkable even today, and extraordinary against an average male height of the time closer to 5’6”. She married a French sea captain, who exhibited her at freak shows across Europe; she reportedly performed for King William III and Queen Mary II in London, paid a guinea for her trouble. She was last recorded near Montpellier, France in 1701, said to have been abandoned and to have died in poverty. Local legend adds a tragic footnote: one of her spurned suitors, a hermit known as MacGilladhu, is said to have lived out his days at Port Coon Cave near the Giant’s Causeway and died of a broken heart — tying her story directly to the Port Coon hermit legend already told on our main myths page.
Tavish Dhu, the pirate of the Skerries
In 1315, during Edward Bruce’s invasion of North Antrim, a Scottish-based pirate known as Tavish Dhu (“Black Tom”) is said to have used the Skerries as a base, luring English supply ships bound for Coleraine onto the rocks with false signal fires, then delivering their cargo — reportedly including gold intended for the Red Earl of Ulster — to Bruce’s forces besieging the town. He was eventually captured and executed in 1317, his head sent to Dublin as a warning. Local tradition holds his remaining treasure is still buried on the Skerries, guarded by his ghost — though, as one local folklorist puts it plainly, no treasure has ever actually been found there. The legend is still marked today by the annual “Pirates Off Portrush” community festival.
Long Gilbert
A legendary tall, fast servant or jester to the Earl of Antrim — Gilbert McLaughlin — is said to have run with the hunt along the White Rocks cliffs before falling to his death. The legend has a real physical anchor: Long Gilbert Quarry, a limestone quarry above the White Rocks worked for hundreds of years until roughly the mid-20th century, with two lime kilns still visible today, is genuinely named after him.
The Ballywillan Princess
At Ballywillan National School’s graveyard, the best-known headstone belongs to Dorothea Ross — locally remembered as the “Princess of Portrush.” She’s said to have been the illegitimate daughter of King James II, conceived during a stopover near Ballymoney in 1689, on his campaign to reclaim the throne from William III and Mary II. She married a Coleraine merchant and reportedly died young, in childbirth. A newspaper report from 1881 records her name and date of death, and her worn headstone still carries a heraldic shield associated with the Stewart royal family — though the surviving record makes her exact age at death hard to reconcile with the James II story, leaving the legend more folklore than confirmed fact.
The wreck of the De Sei
A French warship, said to have been carrying pay and supplies toward Pondicherry during the Napoleonic Wars, allegedly wrecked on Curran Strand while fleeing a British warship in a storm — its captain reportedly dumping chests of Napoleonic gold overboard before running aground with heavy loss of life. Locals are said to have salvaged what they could; the wreck was formally presented to Lord Antrim’s Receiver of Wrecks around 1800, a detail that gives the story a genuine thread of historical plausibility, even if the gold itself was never confirmed found.
(For the story of Magnus Barefoot’s contested death “near Portrush” — and why the historical record actually places it 60 miles south, near Downpatrick — see our Portrush Before Portrush page.)