A mile south of Portrush, in the graveyard beside Ballywillan National School, stand the ruined walls of Old Ballywillan Church — quietly one of the oldest structures anywhere near the town, with a story that runs from a medieval parish church back to a Christian settlement centuries older still.
Medieval origins, disputed dates
Most historians date the standing ruin to the late 13th or early 14th century, though accounts differ: Dr Richard Mant’s History of the Church of Ireland argued for an earlier 11th or 12th century origin, while Samuel Lewis’s 1837 Topographical Dictionary of Ireland called it “an ancient, spacious and handsome edifice,” and noted it was, at the time, the only pre-Reformation church still in use for regular worship anywhere in the diocese. What survives today shows two long lancet windows in the east gable and two smaller ones on the north wall — genuinely medieval features — alongside a broader, round-headed window on the west side that was likely a later, 16th-century addition for Protestant worship.
Two raids, a century apart
The church weathered General Robert Monro’s Scottish Covenanter army, which passed through in 1642 during the Irish Confederate Wars and reportedly left the building down to a few standing walls. Roughly twenty years later, in the Restoration period, it was targeted again — this time to enforce conformity to the re-established Church of Ireland. The Presbyterian vicar, Gabriel Cornwall, was evicted; his congregation responded by building their own meeting-house a few fields west, at Ballymacilvenny.
Despite that, the church stayed in use for another century and a half. Its own vestry minutes, dated 30 October 1837, record the decision to build a replacement church in Portrush itself, judging the old site “for many reasons inconvenient.” The last service at Old Ballywillan was held on 18 September 1842.
Older still
There’s an even earlier layer beneath the medieval church. Local tradition holds that a Christian settlement was founded nearby — at a place recorded as “Portrose” — as early as the 5th or 6th century, by followers of St Patrick, with an early monastic “abbey” once standing on the promontory itself. That site later became the gardens of the Northern Counties Hotel, and is now Antrim Gardens. No record survives of exactly how or when the abbey was lost, though local tradition again points to Monro’s 1642 campaign. Some of its stone is said to have been reused decades later by John Rennie’s labourers building Portrush harbour — and, before that, by local fishermen, who used the ruins as shelter for drying nets.
The graveyard the church stands in holds its own well-known mystery too — the grave of Dorothea Ross, the so-called “Princess of Portrush” — covered in full on our more myths and legends page.
Sources
Sourced from “Old Ballywillan Church - our oldest building?” by Hugh McGrattan, published in Discover Portrush Magazine.