Two pubs face each other across Main Street in Ballintoy, close enough to shout an order from one door to the other. The Fullerton Arms sits at numbers 22 to 24; the Carrick-a-Rede Bar, which locals call McGinn's, is opposite at number 21. Between them, the two pubs account for most of the village's evening life. The street they stand on is the village centre — a single line of houses on the B15, a kilometre inland from the sea.
The Fullerton Arms is a listed inn with rooms, a bar and a restaurant, taken over and reworked in 2016 under Sean and Geraldine McLaughlin. The kitchen calls its food traditional Irish, built on Northern Irish produce: Steak and Guinness Pie, seafood chowder, and Strangford Lough mussels, served with a choice of six sauces that have included Corndale chorizo with tomato and chive, Jawbox gin with ginger and coconut cream, and Bushmills whiskey with Provençal cream. One visitor, Julie S, called the chowder "the best I have ever tasted in my life." The bar keeps Bushmills whiskeys, gins and craft beers, and dogs are welcome in the main bar and in three of the bedrooms. Set into the building is one of the ten Doors of Thrones — Door 6 — carved from wood taken from beech trees felled at the Dark Hedges and shared out among pubs across the region as a Game of Thrones souvenir trail.
Across the street, the Carrick-a-Rede Bar has traded under that name for forty-seven years, in a building that was once the Carrick-a-Rede Hotel. It is family-run, with a turf fire, live sport and live music. The menu is longer and more wandering than the Fullerton's: beer-battered cod with chunky chips, mushy peas and tartare; Donegal langoustine scampi; the Ballintoy Banger, a pork, bacon and cabbage sausage with champ and onion gravy; Antrim ham with Gracehill black pudding and a duck egg; rib of beef braised in Lacada IPA from the brewery up the coast; and, further down the same page, Korean chicken noodles and a five-spice mango curry. The seafood chowder comes with homemade wheaten. Tripadvisor visitors give the place 4.4 out of five and handed it a Travellers' Choice award in 2025.
For daytime there is Ursa Minor Minor at number 20, in the premises that used to be the Wee Shop. It is the seasonal coffee-and-bread outpost of the Ursa Minor bakehouse over in Ballycastle, and what it puts out changes daily. Down at the harbour, a stone cottage holds Roark's Kitchen, doing homemade bakes, sausage rolls, scones, cream cakes, soup and sandwiches, with outdoor seating and the whole harbour in front of it; its opening is seasonal and irregular, so it is worth checking before you rely on it. A coffee truck, Coffee & The Waves, sets up at the harbour in season. What the village lacks is a full grocery shop — for a supermarket you drive to Ballycastle, five miles east, or to Bushmills.
The white parish church stands apart from the houses, out on the road that drops to the water, and from its hilltop the view runs over the harbour to Rathlin Island, the white cliffs, and, on a clear day, the coast of Scotland. Getting down to the harbour means the serpentine road, a steep corkscrew squeezed between limestone cliffs. At the bottom is a small stone harbour, a pocket of sand, rock pools, and a scatter of stacks, reefs and islets, with Sheep Island offshore. The space is tight and the approach is slow, and that is part of what the place is rather than a flaw in the arrangements.
If the harbour looks familiar, it stood in for Lordsport on the Iron Islands in Game of Thrones — the port where Theon Greyjoy comes home to Pyke. The screen tourists arrive by the coachload on fine days. For quiet you walk west.
West of the harbour is White Park Bay, a long sandy arc under high chalk cliffs, backed by a dune system old enough to have buried a Neolithic settlement — hut foundations and hundreds of worked flints came out of the sand in an excavation in 1897, though nothing shows on the surface now. The National Trust calls the beach spacious even on busy days, which is its main advantage over the harbour. The dunes and grassland are a protected site of 87.74 hectares, home to orchids, dark green fritillary and wood white butterflies, common lizards, ringed plover and oystercatcher, with grey seals sometimes hauled out on the offshore rocks. Check the tide before you set off: the ends of the bay can cut off above high water.
The Causeway Coast Way follows this shore. From Ballintoy church it runs seven kilometres west to Dunseverick Castle, about two and a quarter hours, dropping down the corkscrew road, past the old boathouse and lime kiln, then along raised beaches and stranded sea stacks — Elephant Rock among them — before crossing roughly two and a half kilometres of White Park Bay. This is a shoreline walk rather than a village stroll; the full trail carries on for fifty-one kilometres between Ballycastle and Portstewart, usually walked over two or three days.
Half a mile from the village in the other direction is Carrick-a-Rede, where a rope bridge crosses nearly a hundred feet above the Atlantic to a small island. Salmon fishermen strung the first bridge here in 1755 to reach their nets. The National Trust's walk out from Larrybane is a mile there and back, moderate, about an hour, over grass and gravel with some steep pitches and unfenced cliff edges — no pushchairs, no wheelchairs, and dogs can come to the site but not across the bridge. There is a tearoom, the Weighbridge, doing soups, sandwiches, scones and hot food. Even without paying to cross, the walk and the views make a half-day close to the village.
The salmon that the bridge was built for are gone. Fishing at Carrick-a-Rede and Larrybane is recorded from 1620, and at its height Ballintoy parish supported more than eighty fishers; catches of up to three hundred salmon a day carried on into the 1960s. Alex "Achi" Colgan worked the Carrick-a-Rede fishery for more than thirty years and gave it up in 2002, when the final season brought in just 250 fish. "It was the hardest salmon fishery on the coast," he said. The derrick that hoisted the fishing boat clear of storm water stood until 2014.
The harbour itself is younger than it looks. Alexander Stewart tried to build a quay here in the 1750s and failed; no quay shows on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1832 or 1855. The present inner harbour was the work of James Francis McKennan, who bought the foreshore for five guineas in October 1860 and built it to ship out stone and burnt lime from his quarry, with two lime kilns and a tramway already in place. The switchback Harbour Road began the same year, ordered by the county Grand Jury to run from the church down to the limeworks. By 1907 the harbour held between 75 and 80 fishermen and 35 to 40 boats. The lime kilns, the coastguard boathouse of the early 1870s and the breakwater are all still there, and together they explain why a harbour exists on this stretch of coast at all.
The white church on the hill was finished in 1813, to a design by Henry Wynne, keeping the tower of an older church on the site; the long-serving rector Robert Trail, who held the parish for sixty-six years, was in post at the time. On the wall a sundial is dated 1817. A hurricane in December 1894 tore the steeple down, drove part of it through the roof and broke headstones, and it was never replaced. Inside, a window shows St Patrick at Slemish, and a plaque remembers David Elder Jamieson, lost aboard HMS Defence at Jutland; the churchyard holds the graves of sailors from two other wrecked ships. The name Ballintoy, Baile an Tuaigh, means the northern townland.
On the cliff road stands Bendhu, a house the Cornish artist Newton Penprase began building for himself in 1936 and kept working on for about twenty years. He built it in concrete rather than the local stone, which is why it looks like nothing else near it. Penprase had come to Northern Ireland at twenty-three to teach at Belfast College of Art. It is a private house, so it is something to notice from the road rather than visit.
The nearest railway station is at Coleraine, some seventeen or eighteen miles off. Translink's 172 bus runs the coast between Coleraine and Ballycastle through the village, with the summer Causeway Rambler 402 alongside it in the season; times shift with the season and the day, so it is worth confirming before you set out. By road the village is on the B15, five miles from Ballycastle and about seven from Bushmills and the Giant's Causeway. There are public toilets, including an accessible one, at the harbour car park, and more on Main Street.
By evening the harbour feels quieter, once the day's visitors have left. There is a picnic table and a few benches on the quay, and if you have timed it you can sit there with something from Roark's while the light goes off the water towards Sheep Island and Rathlin, and the two pubs up the hill fill quietly for the night.