Opposite the original entrance to Ballywillan Cemetery on Magherabuoy Road sits a small stone building most visitors never notice — the oldest surviving school in the Portrush area, and a building Portrush Heritage Group has formally petitioned to have listed as a Building of Special Historic Interest.
Built by subscription, 1829
Ballywillan National School — recorded elsewhere as “Quigley’s Cottage” — was established in 1829 near the old parish church, funded by public subscription totalling £70, with £55 of that coming from Rev. William Mill, the parish rector. An 1835 Ordnance Survey record describes it as “a good house, slated, 32½ by 16 feet inside,” taught by master James Greer to 35 pupils. A second survey three years later records a more religiously mixed pupil body — Established Church, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic children together — under a new master, James Harton.
The school joined Ireland’s new National Schools system after 1831, making it the first proper school in the Portrush area, and remained in use until 1853, when separate male and female schools opened at the newly built Holy Trinity Church. Those in turn closed once Kelly Memorial School opened in 1896; both it and Mark Street School closed for good in 1957, when pupils transferred to the new Portrush Primary School and Carnalridge Primary School — leaving Ballywillan’s original 1829 building the oldest surviving school structure in the area, still standing today as a random-rubble basalt building with later red-brick infilled windows, once used as a council graveyard-workers’ store and since restored.
A graveyard with its own stories
The building sits inside the graveyard of the ruined Ballywillan Parish Church, believed to date from the 12th or 13th century — an 1837 topographical dictionary described it as unique in the diocese for its continuous pre-Reformation use, before it finally closed in 1843. The graveyard holds its own local legend too: the grave of Dorothea Ross, reputed daughter of King James II, whose full story is told on our Myths and Legends page. It also contains four unusual WWII military burials — an arrangement that doesn’t match standard Imperial War Graves policy, and one the Heritage Group’s own research hasn’t fully explained.
A building this old, sitting quietly in a working graveyard, is easy to walk straight past — which is exactly the case Portrush Heritage Group has been making for why it’s worth stopping to look.