The small natural harbour on the west side of the Portrush promontory is the reason the town exists at all — the Irish name Port Rois means “harbour of the promontory,” and this is the harbour it refers to.
Before the stone harbour
For centuries this was just a natural inlet, rock-strewn but sheltered enough for small trading and fishing boats. A late 16th-century map of the promontory shows the harbour clearly, along with what appears to have been a small castle-enclosure guarding it from the high ground behind. Medieval records suggest a genuinely busy little port — 14th-century boats out of Portrush traded with the Scottish islands and western Scotland — but by the late 1500s the settlement around it had shrunk to almost nothing.
The 1827 harbour and what it changed
The modern stone harbour dates to 1827, built after merchants in nearby Coleraine successfully lobbied Parliament for a proper, sheltered port on this stretch of coast. It cost £16,225 17s 11d — a large sum for the time — and it worked. In the five winters before the harbour was built, records show nine shipwrecks on this stretch of coast; in the years after, none.
Regular steamship service to Liverpool started in 1837, later followed by services to Glasgow. For a while, Portrush harbour was a genuine commercial hub — up to 15 vessels at a time, salmon smacks calling in to re-ice their catch before the run to Liverpool, and later a viewing point for the transatlantic steamer fleets passing offshore. There was even a serious 1880s proposal to expand the harbour into a proper shelter for those larger passing ships, though it was never built.
Salmon, and the winches still standing
Long before the stone harbour, this stretch of coast was already a working salmon fishery. The Earl of Antrim owned the rights from at least the 1630s, when the fishery was worth £20 a year — later leased to local fishermen, with named net stations running from Dunluce Castle to Ballyreagh Castle and up to the Skerries. Two corroded hand-winches from that trade survive today: one at Portneen, visible from the Bath Terrace–Craigvara walkway, and one at Portandhu Harbour, close enough to inspect the original cable drum and cogs up close.
Decline, and what’s left
Regular passenger ferry service stopped after the First World War. Commercial shipping carried on in fits and starts through the 20th century — container ships called in the 1960s, and a ferry service to Oban ran briefly in the 1970s. The very last commercial cargo sailing left Portrush on Sunday 30 June 1968, ending 130 years of commercial shipping at the harbour: the MV Fallowfield, under Captain Richard Saunders, carried a full load of 22 containers on the twice- weekly Preston service before it transferred permanently to Derry, watched off by locals gathered on the quay and North Pier. The harbour’s landmark 25-ton Butters crane was dismantled shortly after. By the end of that decade the harbour’s working life as a serious commercial port was essentially over. Fishing boats are the main traffic today, alongside the leisure craft you’ll see moored there now.
The wreck offshore
The most dramatic maritime event on this coast happened just along from Portrush rather than in the harbour itself: the wreck of La Girona, a Spanish Armada galleass that went down at Lacada Point near the Giant’s Causeway in 1588 with the loss of over a thousand men. Cannon salvaged from the wreck ended up at Dunluce Castle, and some of the gold recovered by divers in the 1960s is now on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast — see our Giant’s Causeway guide and Dunluce Castle guide for more.