Mount Sandel is older than the pyramids. On a low wooded ridge just east of Coleraine town centre, archaeologists have uncovered post-holes from circular timber houses, fireplaces, fragments of flint blades and the bones of butchered wild boar - all carbon-dated to approximately 7000 BC. The people who built those houses were among the very first humans to settle Ireland after the last ice age, arriving by water along the Bann while most of Europe was still forest. They ate salmon and eel. They knapped flint. They lived in clearings beside the river, perhaps the first community ever to call this island home. Eight thousand years later, the town of Coleraine occupies the same banks. Saint Patrick is supposed to have come here in the 5th century and named it after the local custom of burning ferns - *Cúil Raithin*, the 'nook of ferns'. The name has lasted sixteen centuries. Some things in Coleraine are very, very old.
Coleraine as a modern town was built at the start of the 17th century during the Plantation of Ulster. The Honourable the Irish Society - a syndicate of London livery companies - was made responsible for developing much of County Londonderry, and Coleraine was one of two principal urban projects (the other being Derry/Londonderry itself). The slightly skewed grid of the town centre, with its diamond and its lines of low Georgian frontages, is the legacy of that early piece of corporate town planning. Traces of the defensive ramparts that once enclosed the Plantation town can still be found by anyone who knows where to look. The Irish Society still exists - one of the longest-running corporate landowners anywhere - and still owns property in Coleraine. The 1689-91 War of the Two Kings tested those defences when Richard Hamilton's Jacobite army attempted to seize the town and was repulsed. The Protestants later withdrew to Derry for the great siege; when Marshal Schomberg landed at Carrickfergus, the Jacobites quietly slipped out of Coleraine and the Williamites moved in for good.
Stewart Gordon's bridge across the Bann at Coleraine was completed in 1844 and still spans the river. Before the bridge, Coleraine had been a ferry town; after it, the town doubled in population in a generation. Coleraine Whiskey - distilled here from local barley and Bann water - became one of Northern Ireland's prestige labels in the late 19th century, exported across the Empire. The distillery is gone now (Coleraine Whiskey is made by Irish Distillers in Cork these days, more a brand than a place) but the long sandstone shells of the old industrial buildings still stand near the river. In 1968 the New University of Ulster opened on the northern edge of town, putting Coleraine on the modern Irish academic map. The campus brought students, researchers, theatre - the Riverside Theatre in particular was a cultural fixture for half a century before the university announced its closure in 2025 amid funding cuts.
On a Tuesday afternoon in early summer 1973, a Provisional IRA car bomb exploded outside the Coleraine Wine Market on Railway Road. Six pensioners were killed - Elizabeth Craigmile, Robert Scott, Dinah Campbell, Francis Campbell, Nan Davis, Elizabeth Palmer - and thirty-three other people were injured, some of them schoolchildren who lost limbs. A second bomb went off five minutes later at Hanover Place. The bombings remain the single deadliest event in Coleraine's modern history; eleven other people were killed in or near the town before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In November 1992 the IRA returned with a 1,000-pound van bomb that demolished much of the town centre and put the Town Hall out of action for three years. Post-Agreement violence has continued at lower levels: a Catholic community worker, Kevin McDaid, was killed by a loyalist mob in the Heights estate in 2009; a teenager was killed by a pipe bomb the same year; sectarian attacks and shootings have persisted through to the 2020s. Coleraine carries this history more visibly than some Ulster towns, less openly than others.
Hercules Mulligan was born in Coleraine in 1740. As a tailor in colonial New York he ran an espionage network for George Washington that twice saved the General's life - once by warning him of a British plan to assassinate him as he travelled through New Jersey, once by warning of a planned kidnap from his New York lodgings. Mulligan's roommate at King's College had been a young Alexander Hamilton; the two stayed close, and after the war Mulligan's tailoring business flourished as a result of Washington's personal patronage. He is, in a real sense, the Coleraine native who helped make American independence possible. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, in *Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book* of 1836, included a poem and engraving of the Coleraine Salmon Leap - the rocks at the mouth of the river where Atlantic salmon piled themselves leap by leap up the falls in such numbers that the local industry was 'considerable'. The salmon still come, in lesser numbers now, and Coleraine still sits at the bridge over the Bann that Stewart Gordon built.
The three towns of Coleraine, Portstewart and Portrush are known locally as 'the Triangle' - a tight conurbation that share a labour market, a coastline and an identity. Most of the nightlife happens in Portstewart and Portrush; Coleraine provides the offices, the hospital, the university campus, the supermarkets. From here it is a 25-minute drive to the Giant's Causeway, twenty minutes to Bushmills distillery, ten minutes to Portstewart Strand. Coleraine has a substantial Polish community now - 2% of the population, double the Northern Ireland average - drawn by food-processing and care-sector work in the years since 2004. The town is officially classified as the second-poorest local authority in Northern Ireland, both in absolute and relative terms, and the high street has visibly thinned. But the population is still 24,483 and growing slowly, and the bones of the Plantation town - the diamond, the bridge, the Mount Sandel ridge with its 7,000-year-old foundations - remain in place. Coleraine has lasted longer than many towns. Whether it can keep doing so is one of the open questions of contemporary Ulster.
Coleraine sits at 55.13°N, 6.67°W at the lowest crossing of the Lower Bann, about four miles inland from the river's mouth at the Atlantic. From altitude, the town is unmissable - clustered around the river bridge with the wooded Mountsandel ridge to the southeast and the broad Bann flats to the north. The Bann mouth (Barmouth) lies between the resorts of Portstewart and Castlerock. Nearest airports: City of Derry (EGAE) about 12 nm west, Belfast International (EGAA) about 33 nm southeast. The Causeway Coast runs east-northeast from the river mouth past Portrush to the Giant's Causeway and beyond. Coleraine maritime climate brings frequent low cloud and rain - October is the wettest month, with rainfall regularly exceeding 100mm.