In 1800, Portrush had fewer than 30 houses. By 1831, it had its first permanent community building — and the man behind it was one of the most respected figures in Methodism.
A schoolhouse in a sandhill
Rev. Dr Adam Clarke, probably the most revered Methodist figure after John Wesley himself, was born in Co. Derry and worked as a young draper’s assistant in Coleraine before Wesley personally recruited him into the ministry. He went on to become a genuine scholar — fluent in twenty languages. In early 1831, on land at the fork of the Coleraine and Causeway roads granted by Lord Mark Kerr, Clarke set up a school for around 80 children, meeting initially in a dugout in the sandhills before moving to a local man’s two spare rooms. It was the first permanent place of worship on the Portrush peninsula since medieval times, and effectively the town’s first modern public building. Clarke visited again in 1832 while already ill, and died shortly after from cholera — commemorated today by a 42-foot memorial obelisk at Portrush Methodist Church.
The Tsar’s bell
The schoolhouse-chapel held a genuinely unlikely object: a bell cast in Amsterdam in 1681, once owned by Tsar Alexander I of Russia, gifted to Clarke and installed in the building. It rang for over 150 years before finally being removed for safety reasons in 1987, and is now displayed inside the present church. The original 1831 building itself lasted about 50 years before being replaced by the church standing today.
What else was happening
The same period saw the town’s other founding steps fall into place: Sir Walter Scott visited Rev. Dr William Richardson at Ramore House in 1814 to discuss Portrush’s geology; the Coleraine road was built from 1817 despite a typhus epidemic; Rebecca Rice built the town’s first villa, “The Terrace” (now the Arcadia), in 1822; and the harbour, more than 20 years in planning, was nearing completion by 1831.
Over the following decades the pace only picked up: the harbour was finished by 1835, the railway arrived in 1855, and within a few more decades Portrush had gone from a scattering of houses to a full Victorian resort — a transformation that started, in a very real sense, with one small chapel-school and a bell that once belonged to a Tsar.