11 Clandeboye Cottages, Belfast Road, Clandeboye, Bangor, Co Down, BT19 1RJ

11 Clandeboye Cottages is a one-and-a-half-storey, single-bay, mid-terrace Victorian workers' cottage built around 1855, one of a terrace of thirteen dwellings erected for the Clandeboye Estate. It sits on the north side of the main Belfast to Bangor Road, directly opposite the entrance to the Clandeboye Estate, on a steeply sloping site. The terrace is one of only a few surviving examples of this type of estate workers' housing in the Province, and carries additional significance through its long association with the Dufferin family and the Clandeboye Estate.

The cottage has a pitched natural slate roof with intermediate bands of fish-scale courses and clay ridge tiles. The chimney is a replacement in red brick. Cast-iron rainwater goods are fitted throughout, comprising half-circle gutters and circular downpipes, with a uPVC soil and vent pipe to the rear. The walls are smooth rendered with a projecting plinth and corbel course. Windows are replacement timber side-hung single-glazed casements; the ground floor openings have chamfered flush cills with moulded sandstone surrounds and mullions, while the first floor has plain chamfered surrounds and cills. The front door is timber, set in a Tudor-arched opening with moulded surrounds and a fixed light above.

The principal elevation faces west and is asymmetrically arranged, with the front door positioned to the right. To the left is a tripartite ground floor window with painted mullions and surrounds and horizontal timber glazing bars, above which a wall-head dormer carries a bipartite window with horizontal glazing bars. The left elevation abuts number 12 Clandeboye Cottages and the right elevation abuts number 10 Clandeboye Cottages. The rear elevation is principally symmetrically arranged, built in red brick in English garden wall bond. A rear door is centrally placed, flanked by camber-headed arched sash windows at both ground and first floor levels.

The setting includes a front garden on the steeply sloping site. To the rear is a yard enclosed by a painted red-brick wall, with terraced red-brick outbuildings under slated pitched roofs comprising an external toilet and storage. Rear access is through a timber ledged and braced solid gate. Open rural landscape lies to the west, and modern housing development to the north and east.

The date of construction has been the subject of considerable research. A datestone bearing the year 1867 is visible on the south facade of the terrace, but this is known not to be in its original position. First survey records from 1973 show a window where the datestone now sits, and note that at that time the stone was detached and lying in a back yard of one of the houses, suggesting it may have originated from another structure on the estate entirely. The terrace appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, nine years before the date on the stone. While it is possible the terrace was added to the map retrospectively — a practice occasionally used for railway-related buildings — it was not standard practice for ordinary dwellings beyond the railway curtilage. The terrace does not appear separately in Griffith's Valuation of 1856–64, though this is not conclusive, as estate buildings were frequently included within the overall valuation of an estate rather than listed individually. When the buildings first appear in the Annual Revisions in 1866 they are recorded as vacant, which may indicate they had only just been completed internally. A construction date in the mid-1850s best reconciles all the available evidence and is consistent with a physical inspection of the terrace.

The identity of the architect is unknown, but both Benjamin Ferrey and William Henry Lynn were working with Lord Dufferin during the 1850s and 1860s and are considered possible candidates. The terrace is situated on the northern edge of what was then the Clandeboye Estate. To the north lies a shelter belt of trees known as the Walmer Screen, and to the east a wooded area called Walmer Grove — Walmer being the name of a Cinque Port of which Lord Dufferin served as Warden. Correspondence between Lord Dufferin and Mortimer Thomson from 1869 concerning the allocation of estate cottages may relate to these buildings.

The dwellings are recorded in the Annual Revisions from 1866, initially all vacant, with numerous changes of occupier and occasional further periods of vacancy thereafter, consistent with their use as estate workers' cottages. All were leased from Lord Dufferin and Clandeboye and were valued at £3 10s, rising to £4 in 1874, indicating improvements were made at that time. The terrace is captioned "Red Cottages" on the 1901 Ordnance Survey map, a reference to what was originally a brick frontage, though the estate office records that it was always known internally as "Red Row." The now-rendered dwellings are currently called Clandeboye Cottages. Each house originally had a front garden and a small plot at the rear for growing vegetables. The cottages were also originally designed with an open porch area, which was enclosed by bringing the front doors forward prior to listing in 1973.

A row of sheds running behind the cottages appears on the 1858 second edition Ordnance Survey map, confirming that the outbuildings are contemporary with the cottages themselves. In 1985, extensive repairs and improvements were carried out, including replacing internal doors and frames, replacing floorboards, removing kitchen units and partition walls, taking down and rebuilding chimneys, and connecting the houses to sewers and electricity, along with replacing front and back doors. Gas heating has since been introduced, and copper pipework is visible on the rear elevations.

The cottages remain in the ownership of the Clandeboye Estate and continue, in many cases, to be the homes of estate workers or their descendants, giving a remarkable continuity of use from the time they were first built.