The Fishermen Who Didn’t Know What Prawns Were

For as long as anyone could remember, Kilkeel was a herring town. The harbour of Cill Chaoil — Irish for “the narrow church” — sat at the foot of the Mournes where the mountains nearly tumble into the sea. By the early 20th century, more than a third of all herring landed in Ireland came through this single harbour. The quays stank of fish and diesel. The pubs were full of trawlermen. The town ran on silver darlings.

The men who worked these boats were hard people. They knew the Irish Sea in all its moods — the flat calms of August, the screaming gales of January. They knew where the shoals gathered, when to set and when to haul, how to mend a net in the dark. What they did not know — not remotely — was what to do with the odd pinkish creatures that had started appearing in their catch.

It was the 1950s when the prawns first started showing up in any number. Dublin Bay prawns — or langoustines, as the rest of Europe called them — had always been in the Irish Sea, living in burrows on the muddy seabed. But the herring men fished with drift nets near the surface. They weren’t looking at the bottom. They weren’t looking for anything with claws.

As fishing methods changed and trawlers began working closer to the seabed, the prawns came up with everything else. The fishermen had no name for them. They had no market for them. They looked, in the words of one old trawlerman, “like something that crawled out from under a rock.” Which, in fairness, is more or less exactly what they were.

So the fishermen did what fishermen do with things they can’t sell. They threw them back. Or left them on the quay for the gulls. Or, if the catch was poor, brought a handful home for the wife to boil up — more out of curiosity than appetite. The creatures were strange. They had claws and antennae and beady little eyes. The local name stuck immediately: creepy crawlies.

The turnaround happened gradually, then all at once. As herring stocks declined through the 1960s and 70s, Kilkeel’s fishermen needed a new catch. At the same time, European demand for langoustines was soaring — French and Spanish restaurants couldn’t get enough of them. Somebody connected the dots. The creepy crawlies in Kilkeel harbour were the same langoustines selling for serious money on the continent.

Within a generation, the entire fleet pivoted. Boats were refitted for bottom trawling. New prawn grounds were mapped across the Irish Sea, the Firth of Clyde, the Porcupine Bank. The creatures the old men had thrown back in disgust became the most valuable catch in the harbour. Today, langoustines are Kilkeel’s lifeblood. They’re shipped to restaurants across Europe, processed locally, and sold fresh on the quayside. The harbour that once ran on herring now runs on prawns.