Accommodation rathlin island

Rathlin Island is a 50 minute boat trip across the sound from Ballycastle and only a dozen or so miles from the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland. Shaped like a boomerang with one arm about 4 miles long and the other about 2 and a half, the island has three lighthouses and high white cliffs round most of the coast. The tip of the shorter arm is 3 miles from Fair Head, a nearly right angled headland that marks off Ulster's north east cormer.

In the angle of the boomerang, the sheltreed modern harbour at Church Bay is a useful staging post for yachts heading for he Hebrides. Rathlin boatmen are pleased to point out Sloughna-More, "the swallow of the sea", a whirlpool at the southern tip of Rathlin where St Columba is said to have narrowly escaped drowning on a voyage from Ireland to Iona in the sixth century.

The first recorded shipping disaster in Rathlin Sound was in about AD440 when Brecain, son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, and his fleet of fifty curraghs were lost in a great tide rip.