Portbraddon

Fishery remains, sand and cliffs

Five houses stand in a row beneath the cliff at the western end of White Park Bay, and that is more or less the whole of Portbraddon. The Irish name, Port Bradán, means port of the salmon, and for a long time this was an ancient salmon fishing station. A small quay, a boathouse opening straight onto the beach and an ice house cut into the slope above the water are what survive of a fishery recorded here in the Ordnance Survey memoirs of 1830.

The bay does most of the work. White Park Bay is a wide arc of sand backed by ancient dunes and high chalk cliffs, with sea stacks and natural arches at its edges. You can walk it, picnic on it and look for fossils, but you cannot swim: the rip currents are dangerous. Cattle graze the dunes, so dogs stay on leads. There are no toilets or refreshments at the bay, and the path down involves steep gradients and uneven steps.

The lost chapel and cave archaeology

For decades the hamlet's main draw was a visitor attraction eleven feet four inches by six feet nine inches. In 1965 the Rev Con Auld, a retired clergyman and teacher who had also been mayor of North Down, converted an old calf house into a chapel with the help of his pupils. "Why don't we convert the old calf-house into a chapel?" was, he recalled, one pupil's suggestion. St Gobban's measured 11ft 4in by 6ft 9in, was promoted as Ireland's smallest church, and hosted dozens of weddings before it was demolished in 2017 after the property changed hands. "There were a lot of marriages there and people do attach a lot of sentiment to it," the local councillor Cara McShane said afterwards.

There is older history still, most of it underground. In 1931 the archaeologist Andrew McLean May began exploring the cave here, excavating it on and off from Christmas 1935 to the summer of 1939. He found hearths, fish and animal bones, pottery, bone combs, needles and pins, and limpet shells stacked in small conical heaps. His account appeared in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1943.

Coast walking and the inland diversion

The Causeway Coast Way passes through the hamlet. The stretch from Dunseverick Harbour to Ballintoy Harbour is five miles, though at high tide the foreshore floods and you are sent inland along Portbradden Road and Whitepark Road, the latter without a footway. The cliff between the bay and Portbraddon is also unstable and prone to rockfall, so the beach crossing should be attempted only at low tide, and the affected stretch left alone. Dunseverick Castle, a basalt-stack promontory fort and ancient royal site of the Dál Riada Gaelic kingdom that drew Viking raids in 871 and 924, sits about two kilometres west.

Food and harbour stops in Ballintoy

For parking, a café, toilets or a hot meal, you go to Ballintoy, down a steep winding road to a harbour ringed by sea stacks. The Fullerton Arms serves beef and Guinness pie and Strangford Lough mussels with a choice of six sauces, some built on Corndale chorizo, Jawbox gin or Northbound IPA, and keeps three dog-friendly bedrooms. Ballintoy Harbour stood in for the Iron Islands in Game of Thrones. The Giant's Causeway, with its forty thousand basalt columns, is about ten minutes' drive.

Arriving for the landscape

The nearest practical railhead is Coleraine, more than ten miles off; the road in is the B146. What you come for is not the amenities, which are all somewhere else, but the five houses, the sand and the cliff, and the sea that was once counted in salmon.