Williams-Ellis, 1912
The Welshman's Cornish village
Ronald McNeill bought into Glenmona House in 1910 and hired Clough Williams-Ellis two years later to redesign the village around the harbour. Williams-Ellis was thirty and not yet famous. He built whitewashed terraces, a square, a row of low slate-roofed houses, all in a deliberately Cornish idiom — tall chimneys, lime render, asymmetric gables — to please McNeill's wife Maud Bolitho, who was from Penzance and missed home. He came back in 1926, after Maud died, and added the Maud Cottages at the east end of the village in her memory. By then he was working out the ideas that would become Portmeirion in Wales fifteen years later. Cushendun was the prototype, and almost nobody outside the Glens knows it.
Stormlands, season 2
The caves and Melisandre
The red sandstone caves at the south end of Cushendun beach were formed over four hundred million years by sea erosion of Old Red Sandstone — the colour comes from the iron-rich deposits laid down in a hot dry climate when the rocks were forming. HBO scouted them in 2011 and used them in the second season of Game of Thrones for the Stormlands, the scene where Davos rows Melisandre to a cave under Storm's End and she gives birth to the shadow that kills Renly Baratheon. The caves came back in season eight for the Jaime-and-Euron fight on the beach. The walk in is five minutes from the bridge over the Dun; the caves themselves are short, dark, and wet underfoot. Bring a torch and proper shoes. Do not go at high tide.
Why it still looks like this
The National Trust holding
Most Northern Irish coastal villages have been remade by the holiday-cottage market over the last forty years — windows changed, signage shouting, extensions in the wrong materials. Cushendun has not, because the National Trust took ownership of most of the village in 1954, including the McNeill terraces, the square, and the parkland around Glenmona House. The village was designated a Conservation Area in 1980. The Trust runs Glenmona as a holiday let — a single house, sleeps twelve — and lets the rest of the cottages out long-term. The result is a village that looks intentional rather than accidental. The cost is that Cushendun is mostly empty in winter; many of the houses are second homes or Trust lets between guests.