Original Gateway to Holestone House, Ballymena Road, Doagh, Co Antrim

Original Gateway to Holestone House

This is a set of early to mid-19th century masonry piers with ornamentally treated iron gates and railings of distinctive style and proportion. They form the original entrance to the grounds of Holestone House, a fine late Georgian classical house, and are of special interest as a group.

The gateway comprises four octagonal stone piers, a set of iron gates, and railings on low plinth walls, flanked on each side by curving re-entrant walls. It faces south.

The piers are octagonal, built of regularly coursed granite and panelled, with angled bases, rounded stringcourses, and moulded cornices. Each is surmounted by a large ball finial. The gates themselves are of spear-headed wrought iron with base and intermediate panels of intersecting motifs. The intervening plinth walls are of granite ashlar with angled bases and moulded copings, carrying wrought iron railings of similar spear-headed type but with a less intricate pattern. At the outer extremities of the outer pillars are short ashlar granite link walls with humped copings, abutting the curved re-entrant walls on each side; the copings are now missing from the left-hand link wall. The curved re-entrant walls are of snecked basalt with humped granite copings. Dressed copings cease where the curved walls meet the front boundary estate walls on each side, which are of roughly coursed basalt rubble, now much fragmented to the west.

The gateway stands in a rural setting facing onto the main road. It originally led to the main driveway to Holestone House, but that driveway has been closed just beyond the gateway and is now partly absorbed into a field. Holestone House remains visible from the gateway but is now approached from the west. Standing to the rear of the gateway on the east side of the former driveway is a plain single-storey gate lodge, originally of ashlar granite with a hipped slated roof but now enlarged with smooth rendered extensions. Owing to the closure of the main gateway, it is approached by a driveway behind the western boundary wall.

The gateway was built for James Owens JP, DL, as the main entrance to Holestone House, presumably around 1836 when the wall around the deerpark was constructed. The gateway and gate lodge appear on the Ordnance Survey map of 1857 but are not shown on the 1833 map. Holestone House itself was built in 1827.