A blog of sketches of historic buildings

Coleraine 42. Dhu Varren.

12/5/2026

After WWII The influence of International Modernism became more popular and though in austere times there was not a huge amount of building some one off houses were built in the style. My favourite is 61 Dhu Varren Road, Portrush, completed in 1959. This house was designed by Noel Cambell, a local architect. It has since been proposed twice for protection as a listed building and twice rejected by the District Council and the Historic Buildings Council. Clearly, it divides opinion. Cantilevered out towards the road from Portstewart to Coleraine, its present owners have renovated it sensitively and clearly appreciate its heroic modernist character

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Coleraine 36. portrush Railway Station

1/4/2026

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The Victorian age in Coleraine was marked by major improvements in engineering and transport. The Bann navigation allowing boats to travel all the way to Lough Neagh was completed in 1851 (with a salmon fishery at the ‘Cutts’ below Mount Sandel) and in 1855, what was to become the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway, was extended to Coleraine with a branch line to Portrush. This transformed Portrush and the surrounding costal area as it became a major costal resort. That its fine station from 1890, in a half-timbered Elizabethan style, is more than four times the size of the Italianate station in the larger town of Coleraine says a lot. This was not a mere transport hub but a place that reinforced and sold a dream of leisure time by the sea for workers locked in the industrial factories of Belfast (and further afield) for most of the year. Thie sketch uses a photograph taken during the Edwardian period at the height of this usage. The building became the first listed building in Northern Ireland when the legislation was introduced in 1973.

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Coleraine 8. traces of the vikings

8/12/2025

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Though they suffered from numerous raids, and the Annals record the Vikings wintering in Lough Neagh between 839 and 841, unlike Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway, there were no permanent Viking settlements in the Coleraine area. A possible Viking boat burial site was, however, discovered in 1815 in Ballywillin bog in Portrush. This was described in a newspaper as follows: a clinker-built boat "in a mound c.40ft in diameter, composed of stones & clay...about 15 perches from the shore of the bog...it is 6 or 8 feet in height". Another account describes a quantity of gravel ballast in the base of the boat "and a large flat stone for a hearth at one end of her, and a quantity of ashes". The discovery is also recorded several years later in the OS Memoirs as "the keel of a ship found in Ballywillin bog...the boat had no nails and was put together with pegs of wood". it is understood that the boat was broken up for the timber upon discovery. This drawing is of the excavation of the Oseberg Viking boat burial in Norway. It is tantalising to wonder what the Portrush boat might have looked like.

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Coleraine 6. Dunmull Hillfort

4/12/2025

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Dunmull hill fort , sitting up on the flat plane to the south east of Portrush began as a defended settlement in Neolithic times and was occupied again in the Iron Age and then, around AD 600, it became the main royal site for the territory around Coleraine and to the south that was known as Eilne. Because of its defensive position it was used again in later centuries. it is traditionally understood to be a pre- C12th stronghold of the O'Flynns. References to a chair and footprint stone in some sources suggest that it was an inaugural site. It is understood that it was used as a defensive encampment position by the Lagan army in 1649 and as a mass site during penal times. Its last major public use is understood to have been for religious rallies during the Ulster Revival of 1859.

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Coleraine 42. Dhu Varren.

Coleraine 36. portrush Railway Station

Coleraine 8. traces of the vikings

Coleraine 6. Dunmull Hillfort

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