Straid Congregational Church, Main Street, Straid, Ballyclare, Co Antrim, BT39 9NE

Straid Congregational Church, Main Street, Straid

This is a congregational church dated 1857, situated prominently at the corner of Irish Hill Road and Main Street in the centre of the village of Straid. It is thought to be the oldest surviving church of its type in Ireland, with the present structure dating largely from 1857–62 and likely incorporating the fabric of an original meeting house of 1816. The building retains much of its mid-Victorian external appearance while its relatively modest profile reflects its humbler early 19th-century origins. Its unusual footprint traces the building's successive stages of development, from a simple single-storey barn-like structure, through a T-plan arrangement of the 1850s, to its present loosely cruciform, U-shaped form.

The plan is a loose cruciform with a further gabled projection to the south and a diagonally set porch positioned in the re-entrant angle. A modern two-storey hall is attached to the north-west. The roofs are pitched and clad in natural slate with clay ridge tiles, with heavy timber fretted bargeboards and dropped finials to the gables. Walls are pebbledashed over a smooth rendered plinth, with contrasting rendered platbands and sill courses, and stepped quoins. Windows are Gothic-headed with leaded lights set in narrow smooth architraves with masonry sills.

The principal elevation faces south-east and is four bays wide. Bays two and four (counting from the left) project forward and are gabled. Bay one contains a single window. Bay two contains two windows and is surmounted by a rendered bellcote, formed by chamfered pillars supporting a moulded cornice. On the north-east face of this bay there is a modern boarded timber door with a stained glass fanlight over in a Tudor-arched opening, and a single window. Bay three is the longest section, with two windows to the left and the porch positioned in the internal angle between bays three and four, with a traditional rooflight above. The porch has a Tudor-arched recess springing from an impost, with a Tudor-arched vertically sheeted entrance door flanked on each side by narrow pointed arch-headed windows. Bay four contains two windows.

The south-west elevation comprises, from left to right, two modern square-headed windows at ground floor level and one similar window at first floor level, with a gable to the right. It is abutted to the left by the modern two-storey hall, which has a chimney projection. The north-west elevation is completely abutted by the modern hall. The north-east elevation, which faces Main Street, has a projecting central gable containing two windows, flanked on either side by transepts each containing a single window. The datestone at the apex of this elevation is inscribed "Ebenezer Erected 1816, Rebuilt and enlarged 1857".

Rainwater goods are uPVC.

The churchyard is enclosed by plain cast-iron railings with support brackets — partly supplemented by a hedge — mounted on a rendered masonry dwarf wall with stone corner protectors (four in number). There are two pairs of slender cast-iron columns: one pair on the south-east boundary opposite the porch, which had its gate removed in January 2018, and a second pair to the rear on the south-west boundary, which retains its gate.

The listing extends to the church building, the former schoolrooms to the rear, and the gateposts, gate, boundary wall with corner protectors, and railings.

Historical Background

The Congregational Church — originally known as "Separatists" or "Independents" — emerged as a splinter movement from the Church of England in the later 16th century. Rejecting many Anglican practices as "Popish", and believing in liberty of conscience and the independence of each individual congregation (unlike Presbyterianism), its adherents suffered considerably for their convictions. Congregationalists appeared in Ireland in the 1640s and became more numerous during the Commonwealth period, but in subsequent decades survived only as a minor dissenting sect: just six Independent congregations were recorded in the Kingdom in 1695. The movement remained fairly insignificant throughout the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century, depleted largely through emigration. The Ulster Revival of 1859 brought a marked growth in numbers and the founding of many new congregations, mainly in eastern Ulster, with Donegall Street Congregational Church in Belfast becoming the mother church for the movement in Ireland.

Straid Congregational Church is one of the few congregations with pre-1859 roots. Its origins date to 1816, when the local landlord Henry Clements Ellis (d.1826) is said to have provided both a plot of land and the building materials for a meeting house. A structure on this site — at the south-eastern end of a long row of buildings along the west side of Main Street — appears on the 1832 Ordnance Survey map, though it is not captioned there. By the time of the 1840 Ordnance Survey Memoirs the building is described as "one storey high, slated and…47×17 feet in the clear and pretty well lit with five circular segment windows, arched"; inside there were no pews but forms, an earth floor, and the minister (the Reverend James Bain) resided "in an apartment attached". A local historian records that in 1842 "three new windows" were inserted "to improve light" — likely replacing original windows to the rear — along with work to bond the earthen floor, all carried out by members of the congregation.

Further changes were proposed in late 1856, when the congregation agreed "to enlarge the sanctuary and incorporate the old building into the new one", based on plans drawn up by an architect named McCullough. This work created a cruciform church by adding an extension to the middle of the south-west-facing side of the original building, which was largely rebuilt. The congregation also decided, apparently on the recommendation of the Irish Evangelical Society, to raise the roof by six feet. An inscription on the building records these changes, noting that the church was "Rebuilt and enlarged [in] 1857". The revised Ordnance Survey map of 1857 shows the shallow projecting bay on the road-facing wall of the north-eastern section, as well as the new rear extension.

It was not until 1861–63, as a direct consequence of the Revival of 1859, that the building reached its present form. At this stage the southern projection was added — which appears to have originally contained a library, vestry, and schoolroom — along with a gallery, "a new matching entrance on the east wing of the sanctuary" (presumably the present porch), and a new pulpit. Roof repairs were carried out in 1870, and two years later stoves were installed; further improvements to heating followed in 1900, possibly including the installation of a timber ceiling. The ceilings in the vestry, library, and schoolroom were replaced in 1929. In the later 1930s the present render was applied, the window frames were replaced with leaded lights, and electricity was introduced. The building was completely redecorated in 1950, at which point the present pipe organ was fitted. Modern rear extensions were added in 1970–71 (the two-storey block to the north-west) and 1981–82 (the two-storey tail to the composition, which mimics in style the 1861 work). Much of this work was reportedly also carried out by the congregation themselves.

The Ellis holdings in Straid were acquired by the Downshire estate in 1847, and the lease of the plot on which the church stands remains with that estate.