The Cromies refused the railway. In the mid-19th century, when steam tracks were being laid down every coast in the British Isles, the landowning family that ran Portstewart drew the line at their Sabbath. Trains meant Sunday traffic, and Sunday traffic meant the noise of commerce on a day they kept holy. So the station went a mile inland, in a field beside the village of Cromore, and the gentry of Portstewart kept their crescent promenade quiet. That single decision shaped everything that came after. The grand Victorian hotels never quite arrived. The day-trippers thinned. And Portstewart became, instead of a railway resort, a quieter sort of place - the kind that still feels, on a windy afternoon with the Atlantic crashing against the rocks, like a town that chose its own pace.
John Cromie founded the town in 1792 and named it after his maternal ancestors, the Stewarts of Ballylesse. But the Irish had been here long before, and they called the place Port na Binne Uaine - the harbour of the green peak - a name still preserved in the offshore townland of Benoney. The Cromies were not original. A Lieutenant Stewart had leased the land back in 1734 from the 5th Earl of Antrim, and the bones of a small fishing settlement were already in place when the village took its 18th-century shape. What the Cromies did was make it a resort. Crescent-shaped, sheltered by rocky headlands, with a promenade curving along the sea wall - they built the Portstewart that Victorian families came to walk in their stiff collars and long skirts, breathing the salt air for their health.
The Gothic mansion at the western end of the promenade started life in 1834 as O'Hara's Castle - a landlord's folly perched dramatically on the edge of a basalt cliff. In 1917 the Dominican Order bought it and turned it into a school. Dominican College still occupies that spectacular site, where students change classrooms beneath stained glass and look out their windows at the Atlantic stretching toward Donegal. Beneath the convent, a cliff path traces the coast for a couple of miles to Portstewart Strand - a Blue Flag beach two miles long, protected by the National Trust, where the River Bann finally finishes its 80-mile journey from the Mournes and empties into the sea at a sandy mouth called the Barmouth. On clear days the path frames a view that runs from Downhill in the east, past the headland of Magilligan, all the way west to the Inishowen peninsula in Donegal.
Jimmy Kennedy grew up here. In the 1930s, watching one of Portstewart's sunsets stain the Atlantic the colour of a wine-press, he wrote 'Red Sails in the Sunset' - a song that went around the world, recorded by Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and Fats Domino, lifted by the same light that still falls every evening on the same water. Field Marshal Sir George White was born here too, at Low Rock Castle, and went on to command the besieged garrison at Ladysmith in the Boer War. The town's other modern claim sits on the dunes west of the promenade: Portstewart Golf Club, one of the few 54-hole complexes in Europe. Its Strand course, threaded through mountainous links sandhills with the Atlantic on one side and Donegal on the horizon, hosted the Irish Open in 2017 and drew 92,000 spectators - the biggest event the town has ever held.
Every May, Portstewart turns into the loudest place in Ireland. The North West 200 motorcycle race runs a triangular circuit through Portrush, Portstewart and Coleraine, with bikes routinely topping 200 mph on roads that, the rest of the year, take you to the chip shop. It is one of the last great road races in Europe - 150,000 spectators line the verges, the pit area sets up on the coastal road, and for a long weekend the town that the Cromies tried to keep peaceful turns into a different kind of cathedral. The circuit is among the fastest in the world. For a place that once outlawed Sunday trains, the irony lands sharper than the engine note.
In a region defined by sectarian division, Portstewart is unusual. The religious demographics match Northern Ireland's as a whole - roughly half Protestant background, a third Catholic - and community relations are reportedly good. The Strand ward is among the most affluent in the country, with house prices that have rivalled south Belfast. Dominican College sits beside St Colum's Primary on Catholic lines, while the town's Presbyterian, Church of Ireland and Methodist churches dot the streets behind the promenade. There is a sense, walking the seafront in late summer, of a place that has worked out how to be many things at once - retirement haven, golf town, race weekend, school town - without losing the crescent of cottages along the harbour that gave it its first shape.
Portstewart sits at 55.18°N, 6.71°W on the north coast of County Londonderry, between the mouth of the Bann to the west and Portrush headland to the east. From altitude, look for the two-mile crescent of Portstewart Strand glowing pale against the dark sea, the Dominican College on its cliff above the western promenade, and the dune-covered links of Portstewart Golf Club. Inishowen rises across Lough Foyle to the west. Nearest airports: City of Derry (EGAE) about 25 nm west-southwest, and Belfast International (EGAA) about 35 nm southeast. The Causeway Coast can be cloud-bound; in clear weather the linked beaches from Downhill to Portrush form one of the great viewing arcs of the British Isles.