Sand is a funny thing. Like, it is – sand-y. It is washed away in big storms, and comes back the next day (hopefully) when the weather is a bit quieter. It drifts and moves with time as if running through an hourglass. It blows around and piles up against things and maybe wild grass takes root and binds it together and then it stacks up more and then it gives the illusion of stability, of solidity, of permanence. Still, as the bible says, it is the foolish man that builds his house on it: you wonder why your walls have cracks in them, as the foundations shift.
The coast can change quickly. Like, coastal villages on the S-E of England watch their back gardens disappear into the sea in a generation, and the sand is re-deposited ten miles down the coast. The plantation of Coleraine in the 1600s had its nice port, but sand banks formed at the bar mouth and grew and shifted around with the tides – it became treacherous for shipping and they preferred to use Portrush harbour instead.
So, why build an abbey in the ‘Counties land at Portrush in the 1200s? I think of Iona abbey – that’s an island; or Lindisfarne in Northumbria or St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall or Mont St Michel in Normandy – offshore, islands, tidal causeway connections. Isolated places, where monks could do their monk-ey business in seclusion, isolation. One wonders, was Portrush an island?
And why is a viking burial longboat found at Ballywillan – as in the newspaper article below – now maybe a mile away from the shore?
The Elizabethan, Sir Thomas Phillips, in 1609 suggested slashing across to make Portrush an island fortification. That seems crazy to us – but then again, imagine that the landscape was of beaches and sand dunes…..
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The King family were neighbours down the Croc-na-mac road from us, and Ian now in Southampton with photography and navigation skills gives me really interesting photos and analysis.
Here’s a great 1950s photo of his mum’s, of Castle Erin up on a hill – it highlights that it was an island, an outcrop – and all around it was shifting sands. The train embankment, looks oh so solid to us – was just the sand pushed up and stengthened.
(Photo: courtesy Ian King)
And a great postcard from Ian, of 1856. Again it highlights, that Ramore hill was the solid, a massive boss of rock, higher – and that all around was sand.
Height-wise of Portrush, Ian pointed me to a great colour map of the height of the land. I’ve added a marker, about the middle of Croc-na-mac – it is at the giddy height of 33 feet, 10 metres. It doesn’t need much of a water level difference and that whole blue-y purple-y area around that marker is under water.
And on the map, going south, the edge of the green bit, about Carneybaun, is at the vertiginous height of about 70 feet, only about a dozen metres higher than Croc-na-mac (though it felt like much more, cycling up to deliver the ‘Tele).
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OK, so let’s paint a picture. (Its my best story-telling – may or may not be perfect, could be a century or two in error, might be wrong completely in some bits – but well hey-ho a century or two amongst friends….. anyway, enjoy, and tell me if you spot flaws and mis-assumptions.)
1100s, Ramore headland, with the Counties end of Main St, is one island; and Castle Erin is a separate dinky one too – volcanic blobs, sticking up higher than the sandy wet shoreline all around, like a couple more Skerries islands. Vikings sail around, and Magnus lands near War Hollow, and they do their viking stuff and I am left with 6% Norse in my DNA.
The sea swishes around those islands. Croc-na-mac area was the shore, the next higher ground – the original waterfront apartment block. You went out the front door and went swimming (though of course, the terrace doesn’t exist yet but if it did, you could).
1200s, the abbey was built, on an island location. I assume that building materials and products were brought by boat, landing at the Curran strand, the west strand. If I am a monk from Iona, I am very familiar with pulling my clinker boat up Traigh Bhan Nam Monach – the White Strand of the Monks, at Iona – the Curran strand looks the same.
The sea squooshes and sworls and sand banks form. Maybe you can cross to the abbey at low tide, like at Lindisfarne. More sand is deposited, and over decades stacks up to become sand dunes. Marram grass grows up and binds the dunes. Maybe a hundred or two years later, the sandy / tidal / beachy track to that creek of “Port Ruis” – the landing place – gets better esablished, and the little inlet is then great and handy for the Lords of the Route at Dunluce in the 1300s as their main port. And later, 1465, it is now well-connected to the hinterland, with a quayside, and it is a place to trade, and is on the Portuguese map as “Port Rosso.”
1600s, the century of troubles – and the Elizabethan Sir Thomas Phillips has a cunning plan. Hey guys, says Tommo, What about making Portrush an island again, as fortification against those marauding Scots? Looking at the map of Portrush, above (1856 map): from the west strand on the left, across the “Sand hills” (out the front of what is now Croc-na-mac), to the East Strand – that’s pretty narrow, and all sand. Like, Tommy wasn’t thinking of JCBs and quarrying and explosives and rock excavations – just a lot of kids with seaside bucket and spades.
And 1850s, the railway company creates the embankment as platform for the railway track, and promenades are built to steer the tides and the shifting sands, and houses can be built along Eglinton St., and there’s topsoil and green grass grows, and you get the impression that it has always been there and that Portrush has always been a headland.
Croc-na-mac is the bit higher ground, more solid, the ‘shore.’ Over the centuries in front of Croc-na-mac the sea became a beach and then more sand blew in to be the sand-hills, and the first sandy golf course. Like the wise man though who read his bible and knew not to build his house on the sand, there are no properties in that whole sandhills area, out the front of Croc-na-mac – well, apart from the primary school and the new road and the Dunluce Centre of course, and I presume those had deep deep deep excavations to find solid rock foundations.
Croc-na-mac was the “shore,” the solid foundation for Portrush’s building expansion in the early 1900s.
And as well as winds and tides and waves pushing sand around and forming dunes, over the long term the land rises and falls too, and sea levels change. Like visiting White Park Bay with Mr Harper in Geography at Dunluce School – after the melting of the Ice Age, the tectonic plates pop up joyfully without that weight of ice on top, to form raised beaches, with fossils being several metres higher than they should be.
The graph shows that in the Ice Age, about 14,000 years ago, that sea water had turned to ice and the water level had shrunk to be about 30 metres lower than now. You could walk on dry land out to the Skerries – butbe sure to wrap up well.
Warmer weather, 8,000 years ago. Melt water, and the seas re-filled to be about 8 metres higher than now (and the sea shells sank to the sea bottom and then more layers of sediment preserved them as fossils).
And then as sea levels drift downwards, the fossils are now nicely on the sea-shore level at Landsdowne waiting for you to collect. (Well, so I’m told – I have never found one myself.)
I estimate from the chart that a 1,000 years ago, the vikings era, that sea-water was a few metres higher – and so that viking burial long boat came to be buried quite a ways inland from today’s shore, at Ballywillan. (I mentioned that we lived in East Anglia, Fenland, for 15 years until recently. Up on the north coast of Norfolk, at low tides the coastal area is just mudflats, for about a mile or two inland; at high-tide, all is flooded.)
So in low-lying areas like Croc-na-mac, a metre or two of sea level change goes a long way inland! And you may have read in the newspaper article about the boat discovery, at the top of this blog, that “the sea has been retreating for centuries” and that even the higher ground of Crocknamack “was formerly covered with sea water” and “that the hill on which Portrush stands was surounded, like the Skerries, with water.”
Oh, and finally on the topic of sea levels: global warming, ice cap melting. Over the last hundred years or so to the present, Wikipedia says that sea levels rose about 20 cm, 0.2 m. But that that was accelerating, and the next 100 years predicted to be 1m rise in sea level.
Er, 1m rise in a century sounds a lot to me, given that Croc-na-mac is only 10 m above sea level.
So, maybe if we come back again in a few hundred years and if the McMurdo ice cap has melted and sea levels are a few metres higher, we will see if Ramore head and Castle Erin (whatever it is called then) does indeed look like a continuation of the Skerries islands.
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As I am not a professor or anything in geology or maritimeology, I allow myself to be creative, and to do my best interpretation and story-telling.
The Northern Counties hotel that we knew was on the same grounds as the Portrush abbey of the 1200s. In my imagination there was something earlier at that site – a hermitage, monks, a celtic church, a holy shrine – that was subsumed and disappearred into the Abbey foundations.
I think of Portrush as being on the sailing route, the corner, the end of Ireland: the last stopping off point for re-icing of salmon smacks from Ballina in the early 1800s before they dash across the Irish Sea to Liverpool; the later 1800s where you watch the sailing ships and the steamers as they go past Ramore head, from Liverpool or Adrossan going to Portrush or on to Derry or the US. And the 1700s maritime survey was ‘from Kinsale to Portrush’ – the corners, the ends of Ireland.
I imagine that I am a young novice monk, say from Columba’s homelands of Derry. I am going to join the monks on Iona or onward to Lindisfarne. With my fellow novices I am in a little clinker boat. We sail along the coast and pull in on the Curran strand, to stock up on supplies and do any repairs. I go to the holy place on the island and get down on my knees to ask for God’s blessing and His protection, before we set off across the open sea and the next stage of my life’s journey.
Portrush Tales 