Qualla: Rathlin Island

Rathlin Island: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Six nautical miles off the County Antrim coast, a boomerang-shaped island rises out of the North Channel like a piece of basalt that drifted away from the Giant's Causeway and forgot to come back. That, geologically speaking, is almost exactly what happened. Rathlin is built from the same Tertiary lava flows that produced the famous hexagonal columns on the mainland, and from the cliffs at the western end you can see Scotland on a clear day, the Mull of Kintyre sitting twelve miles off across one of the rougher patches of water in the British Isles. About 141 people live here, according to the 2021 census. They share the island with tens of thousands of seabirds and the ghosts of several very dark afternoons in Irish history.

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Rathlin Island: The Cave and the Spider

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the autumn of 1306, Robert the Bruce was a fugitive king with no kingdom. His coronation had ended in disaster at the Battle of Methven; his wife and daughter were in English custody; his brothers would soon be hanged. He fled west across the sea to the Bissett family, who hel...

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Rathlin Island: 1575

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a July day in 1575, the Earl of Essex sent Francis Drake and John Norreys to Rathlin. The MacDonnells of Antrim had sent their women, children, and elderly to the island for safety while the men fought on the Ulster mainland. Drake's ships landed troops. What followed was a ma...

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Rathlin Island: Marconi's Wire That Wasn't

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 6 July 1898, an Italian inventor's employees stood at the East Lighthouse with a transmitter and aimed an invisible signal across six nautical miles of open water to Kenmara House in Ballycastle. It worked. The world's first commercial wireless telegraphy link had just been de...

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Rathlin Island: The Cliffs in Summer

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From April through July the West Light cliffs at Rathlin host one of the largest seabird colonies in the British Isles. Common guillemots stack themselves shoulder-to-shoulder on every available ledge - some 130,000 of them. Razorbills hold the lower terraces. Kittiwakes nest in ...

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Rathlin Island: Living Here

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rathlin's population peaked at over a thousand in the nineteenth century, when the island produced kelp on a commercial scale and most people spoke Irish. The Irish language survived here until the 1950s and the 1960s, when the last native speakers died. The local dialect was unu...

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