Not every piece of Portrush’s history is a fully-solved story. A few small, genuinely unexplained objects are still sitting in plain sight, right along the paths most visitors walk every day.
The Harbour Stone
Near the RNLI station and pedestrian bridge sits a large, almost rectangular basalt block — 120 x 93 x 72 cm — with squared, quarry-cut faces, one fractured corner, and a neat row of three small chisel slots cut into its top face and side. The tooling shows stonemasons clearly intended to remove an irregular corner but never finished the job. Nobody knows why. It might be leftover material from a harbour-wall repair, a piece of decorative “rock armour,” or even an abandoned memorial — perhaps for the RNLI or local fishermen. No one has confirmed which.
A pint of Guinness, and a working trig pillar
Outside the Harbour Bar stands a small black-and-white pillar, shaped unmistakably like a pint of Guinness — genuinely one of Portrush’s Ordnance Survey bench marks, used since the 19th century to record precise elevation. Five more survive around town: on the Antrim Gardens boundary wall, at the former Strandmore House driveway, on Portrush Primary School’s boundary pillar, and two close together on opposite sides of Long Gilbert Bridge. Fifteen further historically recorded bench marks have vanished through redevelopment over the years. Above the town, at Scudion Craig, a trig pillar built in 1950 as part of a province-wide re-triangulation still stands — technically redundant since GPS replaced triangulation surveying in the 1990s, but never taken down.
Two stones marking old boundaries
On Kerr Street near the harbour steps, a small concrete marker inscribed “M.R. / N.C.C.” records the old Midland Railway Northern Counties Committee, which controlled the local railway between 1903 and 1923 — meaning the stone likely dates to the very start of that period. A second, larger boundary marker stands on Magheraboy Road, inscribed “County Boundary / Antrim / Derry,” recording the historic line between the two counties; its exact age is unrecorded, though local estimates suggest at least a century.
Reading the postboxes
Portrush’s dozen or so postboxes carry their own quiet history, visible if you know what to look for. The royal cipher cast into each box — VR, GR, GVIR, EIIR — records which monarch was on the throne when it was installed; only two boxes in town, on north Ballywillan Road and Hopefield Avenue, still carry the George VI cipher, everything else dating from the current reign. Roadside postboxes only reached Ireland in 1855, following an idea novelist (and Post Office official) Anthony Trollope brought back after seeing them in Europe — and for the record, boxes were originally painted red, switched briefly to bronze-green in 1859 to save money, then reverted to red in 1874 after enough public complaints forced a decade-long repainting effort.
An unexplained spring
On the east side of Ramore Hill, overlooking Portscaddan and Reviggerly Point, a small stone-lined spring sits just ten metres from a busy footpath — marked simply as a “Well” on the 1900 Ordnance Survey map, yet unknown to most people who walk past it. One theory connects it to a holy well tradition linked to St Patrick, echoing a similar well at Portstewart’s Strand Head; another suggests it corresponds to a water source shown on the earliest known map of Portrush, possibly in the very same spot now occupied by the recreation grounds. Both ideas remain, honestly, speculation — which is exactly what makes it worth a second look next time you’re up there.