The original public bar at Mary McBride's measures five feet by nine feet six inches, which for a time made it one of the smallest in Ireland. One St Patrick's Day, 42 people were counted inside it. The pub now includes an upstairs restaurant, but the small room remains, along with the name of the woman who ran the place from the 1950s until she died in 1983. Mary McBride never drank, and she would not serve women in the bar.
The kitchen now turns out steak and Guinness pie with champ, cod, scampi, crispy chilli chicken and a dish called Cock and Bull, with seafood chowder when it comes in. Puddings are cheesecake, apple pie and lemon meringue. There is regular live music. One of the doors carries the number 8, left from Game of Thrones, which filmed in the red sandstone sea caves at the south end of the village.
Across the way, the Village Tearooms does seasonal cooking, cakes and hot drinks in a modern room. For anything else, the Costcutter on Main Street handles groceries, newspapers and household basics.
The village looks, deliberately, like Cornwall. In 1912 Ronald John McNeill commissioned the architect Clough Williams-Ellis to build it in a Cornish idiom for his Penzance-born wife, Maud. After Maud died in 1925, Williams-Ellis designed the row of whitewashed Maud's Cottages in her memory. The National Trust has looked after most of the village since 1954.
It sits where the River Dun meets the sea, at the foot of Glendun, with a sheltered harbour and a sandy beach that opens east towards Scotland. On a clear day the Mull of Kintyre stands about fifteen miles off across the North Channel.
Walking starts at the car park. The Cushendun Long Walk is a waymarked 1.9-kilometre loop around the village and along the river. Inland, Cregagh Wood climbs steeply through a nature reserve where red squirrels are the draw, and Ronan's Way runs four loops across a working farm in Glendun, the longest of them reaching high enough to see the Mull of Kintyre again.
The old church stands a little apart, a red-sandstone chapel of ease from about 1838 with a square bell tower and tall tapering pinnacles. A 1972 architectural guide called it "a plain and pretty little country church of reddish rubble." It was deconsecrated in 2003 and had fallen into decline when the local preservation trust entered it in the BBC's Restoration Village and won the Northern Ireland heat in 2006; it reopened as an arts and heritage centre in 2019. Louis MacNeice and John Masefield sat in it on summer visits, and a blue plaque marks the poet Moira O'Neill, who worshipped there as a girl.
Cushendun is off the A2 between Cushendall and Ballycastle; the narrow Torr Road is the more dramatic way in when the weather allows. The nearest railway station is at Ballymena, about 23 miles off, and the number 150 bus links the car park to Cushendall, Glenariff Forest Park and Ballymena from Monday to Saturday, with nothing on a Sunday.
Baron Cushendun is buried in the same small churchyard as his nationalist cousin Ada McNeill.