Cushendun

Cushendun sits at the mouth of the River Dun and Glendun, one of the Nine Glens of Antrim. It’s best known for its cluster of whitewashed, Cornish-style cottages with slate roofs and rounded corners — an unusual look for this coast, and a deliberate one.

The village was designed in 1912 by architect Clough Williams-Ellis (later famous for the Italianate village of Portmeirion in Wales), commissioned by Ronald John McNeill, Baron Cushendun, to please his Cornish-born wife Maud, who was homesick for Penzance. After Maud died in 1925, Williams-Ellis designed a further row of cottages in her memory, known as Maud’s Cottages. Williams-Ellis also rebuilt nearby Glenmona House after fire destroyed the original in 1922.

The whole conservation village has been in the care of the National Trust since 1954, acquired from Lord Cushendun’s daughter.

Cushendun’s sea caves — a separate, natural feature, not part of Williams-Ellis’s work — are another local draw, cut into the red sandstone cliffs at the shore.

A literary retreat

Cushendun’s sheltered anchorage made it a natural crossing point to Scotland — a ferry ran between here and Dunaverty until the mid-19th century — and after 1800 it developed into a modest seaside resort, with three hotels built to serve visitors drawn by sea bathing. The village attracted a run of writers and artists: poet John Masefield, later Poet Laureate, married Constance Crommelin of Cushendun’s Crommelin family in 1903; poet Moira O’Neill (born Agnes Higginson) was raised at nearby Rockport, where she wrote Songs of the Glens of Antrim; and Louis MacNeice’s father rented a holiday cottage here, inspiring his 1939 poem “Cushendun.”

On the shorefront stands Johann the Goat, a bronze sculpture by Deborah Brown. Johann was the last animal culled in Cushendun during the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, and the statue stands as a memorial to the local farmers who lost livestock that year.