Horse walk at 13 Ballynacooley Road, Ballynacooley, Randalstown, Co Antrim, BT41 3NB

Remains of a Horse Walk at 13 Ballynacooley Road, Ballynacooley

This site, located roughly three and a half miles south-west of Randalstown, preserves the fragmentary remains of a horse walk apparatus alongside a long single-storey rubble-built vernacular house or outbuilding, possibly dating to before 1835.

The visible remains of the horse walk are scattered and incomplete. On the east elevation of the associated building, to the right of centre, there is a shallow narrow trench approximately a metre in length containing a section of octagonal iron or steel shaft. This shaft extends from the building's foundations, disappearing within or beneath the building's floor, and extends roughly half a metre from the wall, supported on a cast iron bracket set on loose bricks. A few metres to the north-west of the shaft stands a relatively large cast iron cog with a bracket beneath it, both set on loose concrete bricks. This assemblage is not connected to any other machinery. A long flat metal bar lies a few metres away from the cog, which earlier photographs suggest was originally attached to it and presumably stretched from the cog to the horse's yoke. Notably, there is no visible platform on which a horse would have walked, nor any evidence of a covering structure, though such walks were typically open. Apart from these scattered pieces of machinery, there is little external evidence confirming the horse walk's existence.

The associated building is a long single-storey rubble-built structure with a partly cement-rendered façade and a corrugated asbestos roof, which appears to have been raised at some point. It has an irregular series of window and doorway openings on both east and west elevations; the windows are frameless or deteriorating, while some doorways on the west side retain plain timber-sheeted doors. The building is derelict and in very poor condition, with much of the façade covered in creeping plant growth and substantial areas of rubble walling fallen away. The building appears originally to have served as a house with outbuildings but latterly as outbuildings only.

Historical and cartographic evidence shows that buildings matching the position of the present structure and another house on the roadside to the immediate west appear on the Ordnance Survey map of 1832–33, though the building shown on this site appears slightly shorter than the present structure. Neither building is recorded in the first valuation of circa 1835, but both appear in the 1859 valuation as homes of Jane Donnelly and William Young, though the valuers did not specify which occupant lived where. An 1878 valuation entry records that the house formerly occupied by Jane Donnelly was knocked down in that year and seemingly rebuilt on the same site, but it cannot be determined which property this refers to. Both properties were in the hands of James Charleton by 1914 and remained so until at least the 1930s.

The surviving machinery suggests the horse walk apparatus operated in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. None of the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps up to and including 1921 show evidence of the horse walk's existence, nor is it mentioned by valuers, though this does not preclude its presence as such devices were generally overlooked by valuers if not contained within a structure and were often unmarked on Ordnance Survey maps.