From the top of Ramore Head, roughly 90 miles of coastline is visible, from Inishowen to Torr Head — and the headland itself has spent centuries fending off, or narrowly avoiding, one development scheme after another.
What’s already gone
The southern end of the hill, once known as Crannagh Hill and used as a traditional lookout for Bann river pilots, was quarried away entirely in the late 1820s — roughly 100 feet of it removed to build Portrush Harbour. The resulting quarry later held coal storage, an RAF Marine Craft Unit in the 1960s, and Portrush Yacht Club, before becoming the site of Waterworld today. The ancient Crooby Stone — known locally as Carrig na Vitah, or “Crow’s Stone” — was pushed off the cliff roughly forty years before this story was written, for reasons no one recorded. Even the “Great Fort” that reportedly gave Rathmore/Ramore its name has vanished completely, with only a faint impression on a 16th-century map as evidence it ever existed.
A secret wartime listening post
During the Second World War, a “Y Station” on the headland secretly monitored enemy ship radio traffic around the clock, relaying intercepts to Bletchley Park — reportedly including intelligence that contributed to the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, sunk in May 1941. It’s a claim the Heritage Group’s own account appropriately hedges as a question rather than a certainty, but it’s a striking possibility for a headland now known mostly for its coastal path.
Near misses
Development schemes for Ramore Head and the Skerries kept resurfacing without ever quite landing. An 1859 National Refuge Harbour Society report proposed linking Ramore Head to the Skerries as a harbour — the same idea explored in more formal detail the previous year, covered on our page about The Harbour That Almost Was. A revived 1894 scheme imagined a concrete pier serving as a transatlantic mail-boat calling station. A wartime Ministry proposal for a convoy safe haven is reliably reported to have been shelved once the D-Day landings changed Allied shipping priorities. An 1857 Antrim Estate development map even proposed mansion housing across the hill — never built. Most detailed of all: a 65-page 1944 town-planning report by Charles Aliaga-Kelly proposed a cliff-path and even a tunnel through the rock, submitted formally to the council but never implemented.
Protected today
Around a decade before this story was researched, Ramore Head and the Skerries were formally declared an Area of Special Scientific Interest — a quieter, more durable kind of protection than any of the schemes above ever offered, and one that finally puts the headland’s long history of near-misses to rest.