Rathlin Island

Church Bay: pub, harbour and provisions

McCuaig's Bar stands opposite the beach at Church Bay, and it is the only pub on Rathlin. Nameplates salvaged from ships wrecked on the surrounding rocks hang on its walls; there are two pool tables and a dartboard in the games room, and on some nights someone plays traditional music. The adjoining Ebb & Flow café covers breakfast and lunch. Outside, a run of tables faces the water, which is where you want to be when the evening light comes across Church Bay. Fish and chips and a vegan burger turn up in recent accounts, and Guinness comes up often enough to be worth knowing about. Dogs are welcome at the outdoor tables. The present bar is not the original McCuaig's — that stood further up the hill, in what is now a private house above the hostel.

Almost everything on Rathlin gathers at Church Bay, on the sheltered southern side where the ferry lands. The island is roughly L-shaped and mostly empty: its west and north ends break off in vertical cliffs, and the pub, shops, cafés, harbour and one of the churches sit in the single stretch of coast that lets a boat come in safely. This is Northern Ireland's only inhabited offshore island, and it is small enough to get around largely on foot or by bike.

Along the harbour front, the Manor House is a Georgian block built in 1756 for the Gage family, who had bought the island a decade earlier. It is now a restaurant and café with rooms above. Irish seafood is the speciality, with chicken wings and beef burgers among the plainer options, and the café side does light lunches, homemade scones and hot drinks. The house had fallen a long way before this. The National Trust bought it in 1998, and a community-led reconstruction in 2016 turned it into twelve bedrooms, a restaurant and an event space, rebuilt with island labour. A local family runs it now.

The Rathlin Co-op Shop, near the harbour, is the island's grocery, and it is community-run — the co-op took over the shop role after David Hannaway closed the business his family had kept for years. You can get everyday essentials, coffee, fresh-made wraps and hot snacks, alongside a craft counter selling Rathlin-made silver jewellery and pottery, Hooked on Rathlin hats and scarves, and Islander Kelp seaweed products. Island Treasures, the Church Bay souvenir shop, doubles as the island Post Office and sells prints, postcards, island-made soaps, sweets, ice lollies and beach toys.

Studios, seabirds and island routes

Breakwater Studio, also at Church Bay, is the home and workplace of the painter Yvonne Braithwaite and her husband Robert. She has painted for more than thirty-five years and opened the studio in 2013; it sells her Rathlin paintings, cards, prints, tea towels and aprons, along with Made Local ceramics and her daughter Tanya's crocheted hats and scarves. Seals sometimes bask on the rocks opposite. Elsewhere on the island Teresa McFaul, a resident of forty-five years, hand-knits puffins, toys and personalised baby blankets. The Lazybird Café, again at Church Bay, cooks with home-grown and local produce and keeps vegetarian options, with gluten-free depending on the day.

For most visitors the reason to come is on the cliffs. Every spring and summer thousands of puffins, fulmars, kittiwakes and razorbills return to nest on the western headland, and the RSPB runs a seabird centre at the West Light, four and a half miles from the harbour. The lighthouse is worth the trip on its own terms: built into the cliff at Bull Point between 1912 and 1916, it has its lantern at the bottom rather than the top, so that mist rolling over the headland would not hide the light, which is how it came to be called the upside-down lighthouse. Getting to the main viewing platform means ninety-eight steps down, and the lighthouse a further sixty-four; the paths are rough and hilly, and the centre does not admit dogs other than assistance dogs.

You do not have to walk the whole way. Two private minibuses, run by Derek Curry and Francis McGinn, shuttle between Church Bay and the West Light and try to meet the ferries; they take cash only, and the run is about twenty minutes. Soerneog View Cycle Hire rents standard and electric bikes in season, and you can bring a bicycle across on the larger ferry when there is room.

The walks range from short to serious. The East Light Walk is a gentle two miles that passes both island churches on the way to the eastern headland. The Roonivoolin Trail is a four-mile loop around the southern reserve's cliff edge, with views toward Donegal and the Mull of Kintyre and a good chance of grey and common seals, oystercatchers and ringed plovers below. The Kebble reserve at the western end combines grassland, heath, fen and a freshwater lake, hemmed on three sides by cliffs; dogs are not allowed in it. The Kinramer Permissive Path is closed for repairs. The cliffs are a constant hazard, there are no toilets out at the far walks, and stout footwear is the sensible default.

Cliffs, lights and contested history

Rathlin sits within the Antrim Coast and Glens Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and its geology is unusually plain to read: a base of Cretaceous chalk and limestone under darker Tertiary basalt, cut into very high cliffs and stacks along the north and east. On clear days you can see Donegal, the Antrim coast, Islay and the Mull of Kintyre. Mill Bay and Roonivoolin are the places to look for seals, and the island has its own rarity in the golden hare, a pale colour-form found here.

There are two more lighthouses. The East Light, on the exposed eastern headland, is the oldest — designed by George Halpin Senior and first lit in 1856, it originally carried two lights so that mariners would not confuse it with others in the North Channel. The small octagonal South Light at Rue Point, on the wave-washed southern tip, dates from 1921.

The island's history is longer and stranger than its size suggests. In the autumn of 1306 Robert the Bruce took refuge here after his defeats in Scotland, and local tradition ties him to a cave and to the spider that, rebuilding its web, is said to have argued him into fighting on; the cave is on private land and is best seen from the sea. In late July 1575 forces under John Norris and Francis Drake, sent by the Earl of Essex, killed around six hundred people sheltering on Rathlin, most of them non-combatants, including members of Sorley Boy MacDonnell's family.

Kelp, signals and island faith

For a long stretch of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the island ran on kelp — seaweed burned to ash for industry — and the trade was profitable enough that in 1784 its proceeds covered the island's entire rent. The Kelp Store at Ouig, built by the Gages, still stands, with ships' timbers reused as its beams. There may have been a hundred and fifty kelp kilns here in the mid-nineteenth century. The population was over a thousand in 1831, and the year-round population is far smaller now.

Two later moments left their marks on the headlands. In 1898 Marconi's people set up a wireless link between Ballycastle and Rathlin for Lloyd's, passing observations of transatlantic shipping to London, and the first successful test transmission was made on 6 July; weathered concrete anchor blocks from the signalling mast still sit near the East Light. In 1917 a German torpedo sank the armoured cruiser HMS Drake in Rathlin Sound, where the wreck remains a protected monument.

Both of the island's churches are at or near Church Bay. St Thomas', the Church of Ireland church, has an early-eighteenth-century foundation, with conflicting accounts of whether the present building is 1725 or an 1812 rebuild; when it reopened after restoration in 2004 about a hundred and seventy islanders and visitors came, and the island's Roman Catholic congregation joined the small St Thomas' congregation for the service. The Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception, opened in 1865, stands on the site of a former mill that was bought and converted around 1816, and it was repaired and reopened as recently as 2017.

Family stops, ferry planning and evening calm

For families there is a large playground at Church Bay, kept up by the council, and the Boathouse Visitor Centre, which is free and covers the island's history and wildlife. Rathlin Boat Adventures runs charters and sea-angling trips, and the Rathlin Sound Festival, spread across the island and Ballycastle, comes round each May.

A stay here needs a little planning that a mainland village would not. There is no railway; the nearest is at Coleraine, and Translink buses connect it with Ballycastle, where the ferry leaves. The crossing takes about half an hour on the passenger-only Kintra II or roughly forty minutes on the larger Spirit of Rathlin, which carries vehicles, bicycles and luggage; both are weather-dependent, and it is worth booking the return as well as the outward leg. Ordinary visitor cars need a permit, so most people arrive on foot or by bike. Food choices are few and shop stock is necessarily limited, so a week here is easier if you bring and plan your groceries rather than expecting to shop on impulse.

None of this feels like hardship once you are on the island. On the freshwater Ushet Lough the islanders still build and race model yachts, worked on through the winter and sailed at Easter by people who see one another every day. "It is easier to live here now than it was 30 or 40 years ago," the Rathlin-born bell ringer Johnny Currie has said, "with electricity and a water supply and better boats." From the tables outside McCuaig's, with the seals working the harbour and the last ferry long gone, the bay settles into its evening.