About a mile and a half off Portrush sits a scattered chain of 17 small islands — the Skerries — covering roughly 24 acres, with vegetation growing on only four of them.
A pirate’s island
Local legend gives the easternmost island, Island Dubh, its name from Tavish Dubh — the same pirate whose full story is told on our Myths and Legends page — said to have been buried there, though the exact grave site is unknown. A 1913 guidebook also preserves a second, separate tale from 1782: a French brig carrying supplies for the French army in India, captured by an English privateer off Donegal, sought shelter at the Skerries during a storm. The privateer survived; the brig didn’t, sinking on a sandbank with a chest of money lost in the wreck, and its cargo salvaged by Lord Antrim for his house at Ballymagarry. Neither story is independently verified — both read as classic local maritime legend rather than documented fact, but they’re the kind of tale that’s been told at the Skerries for generations regardless.
What the old maps show
Comparing the 1900 Ordnance Survey map against an 1865 Admiralty Chart reveals the islands were named differently across different periods — the same rocks going by different labels depending on who was surveying them. The 1865 chart also shows a ropeway once running from Craigahulliar Quarry over Curran Point, a small piece of industrial history now long vanished.
A family tradition
Local memory carries the Skerries’ more recent history too. Paul Ross, who grew up exploring “the Wee Skerries and the Big Skerries” in the early 1950s, recalls his grandfather Sammy Ross — known locally as “The Gannet” — and great-uncle Willie McIntyre, Portrush fishermen who held a summer contract painting a 35-foot navigation beacon known variously as “The Storks,” “The Skirks,” or “The Iron Man.” The beacon stood for decades until it was blown down in a January 2017 gale, since replaced by marker buoys — a small, human thread connecting a family’s working life to a landmark that’s now gone.