Runkerry Beach, also known as Bushfoot Strand, is a roughly 500m-long, 80m-wide sandy beach facing northwest, easily reached from the Portballintrae end near Bushfoot Golf Club. A walking path along the old tramway offers sweeping coastal and North Atlantic views.
The beach - also sometimes called Blackrock - sits at the mouth of the River Bush, just under a mile long along the river’s northern side. It’s popular for surfing, walking, and dolphin watching, though it can shelve steeply at high tide, so care is worth taking.
Surfing: genuinely rated as one of the UK’s better surf beaches, with waves ranging from around 2ft in summer to as much as 12ft in stormy weather.
The Giant’s Causeway and Bushmills Railway
The heritage railway runs through the dunes above Runkerry Beach, crossing the River Bush with views of Runkerry Headland, on its short journey between Bushmills and the Giant’s Causeway - a genuinely memorable, family-friendly way to arrive. The current timetable (days and times of operation) wasn’t independently re-verified this pass - check directly before planning around it.
Runkerry House
Visible from the beach across the basalt cliffs of Runkerry Point: Runkerry House, a Scottish Baronial-style mansion built in 1883 for Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten - a High Court judge and MP who, despite practising and sitting in Parliament from London, was himself Ulster-born gentry rather than an outside figure. The sandstone building is now private apartments.
A “Morphing” Beach
Runkerry/Bushfoot Strand is noted for absorbing more wave energy than any other beach in Northern Ireland, with its shape genuinely changing in response to seasonal sea conditions - a real, cited example of dynamic beach morphology.
