Qualla: Coleraine

Coleraine: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Coleraine: The Honourable Society

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 principa...

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Coleraine: Bridge, Distillery, University

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Coleraine: 12 June 1973

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 oth...

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Coleraine: Hercules Mulligan and the Salmon Leap

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 o...

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Coleraine: The Triangle

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 u...

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