Mines in County Antrim

County Antrim's coal was worked along its dramatic sea cliffs at Ballycastle for centuries, with organised export beginning in the 1730s once the entrepreneur Hugh Boyd developed the mines and built an entire town — complete with glassworks, iron foundry, salt pans and brewery — around them. Ballycastle remained the last area of commercial coal extraction anywhere in Northern Ireland. The county also holds two unusual stones. Porcellanite, a very hard, fine-grained rock formed where volcanic heat baked older rock, was quarried at Tievebulliagh and on Rathlin Island in the Neolithic and roughed out into stone axes that were traded across Ireland and Britain; more than 10,000 are known. Rhyolite, a lava with the make-up of granite that is rare in the north of Ireland, was erupted by the Tardree volcano about 60 million years ago and quarried at Tardree for building stone, and its cavities hold tiny crystals of tridymite.

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