Qualla: Ballycastle, County Antrim

Ballycastle, County Antrim: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Taibhseoir, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1898, a 24-year-old Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi sent a wireless signal from a temporary station in Ballycastle to the East Lighthouse on Rathlin Island, six miles offshore. It was the world's first commercial wireless telegraph transmission, paid for by Lloyd's of London to relay sightings of approaching ships. The aerial mast that made it possible was the new octagonal spire on the Catholic church on Moyle Road. A grey stone monument by the harbour now marks where Marconi stood. Local people still tell visitors that their town was the place radio became a business.

Image: Taibhseoir | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballycastle, County Antrim: From Three Settlements to One Town

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit michael clarke stuff, CC BY-SA 2.0. Modern Ballycastle is really three older places knitted together: the settlement around Dunaneeny Castle on the cliffs to the north, the small village that grew up at Bonamargy Friary east of the river, and the medieval castle and its dependents at the spot where The Diamond now ...

Image: michael clarke stuff | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballycastle, County Antrim: Sorley Boy's Country

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnArmagh, CC BY-SA 3.0. From the late fourteenth century the area was at the heart of MacDonnell territory in Ireland. The clan's claim to the Glens of Antrim ran back to the 1399 marriage of John Mor MacDonald to the Bisset heiress Margery Bysset. It was Sorley Boy MacDonnell, born around 1505 at Dunan...

Image: JohnArmagh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ballycastle, County Antrim: Lammas and Yellowman

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lindy Buckley from Nanjing, China, CC BY 2.0. Every year on the last Monday and Tuesday of August, around sixty thousand people pour into a town of fewer than six thousand for the Ould Lammas Fair, one of the oldest surviving fairs in Ireland. The name comes from Lammas, the medieval church harvest festival of loaf-mass on 1...

Image: Lindy Buckley from Nanjing, China | CC BY 2.0

Ballycastle, County Antrim: The Beach, the Strand, the Birds

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit michael clarke stuff, CC BY-SA 2.0. The town's beach, the Strand, stretches half a mile east of the river mouth and has long been a Blue Flag beach. At its eastern end, Pans Rocks jut into the sea, the remains of an 18th- and 19th-century iron salt-pan industry that boiled seawater for the crystal trade. Just beyon...

Image: michael clarke stuff | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballycastle, County Antrim: The Troubles Touched Here Too

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenneth Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ballycastle, like most Northern Irish towns, did not escape the Troubles. On 26 August 1973, loyalist paramilitaries left a car bomb timed to detonate as the congregation of St Patrick's and St Brigid's church on Moyle Road left mass. The service ran late and the bomb exploded in...

Image: Kenneth Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballycastle, County Antrim: An Astonishing Cast of Sons and Daughters

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, Public domain. For a town this size, Ballycastle has produced a remarkable list of people who went on to matter. Sir Roger Casement, the human rights crusader and Irish Republican executed by the British in 1916, was born in Dublin but raised by his Ballycastle father's family. Robert Quigg, a ...

Image: United Kingdom Hydrographic Office | Public domain