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

13 Clandeboye Cottages, Belfast Road, Clandeboye

This is a one-and-a-half-storey, single-bay, end-of-terrace Victorian workers' cottage built around 1855, forming part of a terrace of thirteen cottages 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.

Architectural Description

The roof is pitched and covered in natural slate with intermediate bands of fish-scale courses and clay ridge tiles. There is a tall rendered chimney. Rainwater goods are cast iron, comprising half-circle gutters and circular downpipes, with a uPVC soil vent pipe to the rear. The external walls are smooth rendered with a projecting plinth and corbel course. The 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 openings have plain chamfered surrounds and cills. The front door is timber, set within a Tudor-arched opening with moulded surrounds and a fixed light above.

The principal gabled elevation faces west and is asymmetrically arranged. The front door is positioned to the right. To the left is a tripartite ground floor window with painted mullions and surrounds and horizontal timber glazing bars, and above it a bipartite first floor window also with horizontal glazing bars. The left-hand (side) elevation is largely blank, with a wall-head dormer on its left side containing a bipartite timber casement window. The gabled rear elevation is also asymmetrically arranged, built in red brick in English garden wall bond. A rear door sits centrally, flanked by camber-headed arched casement windows at ground floor level, with a single window to the left at first floor. The right-hand elevation abuts number 10 Clandeboye Cottages.

Setting

To the front is a garden. To the rear is a yard containing terraced outbuildings in red brick with slated pitched roofs, comprising a former toilet and storage, accessed via a timber ledge-and-braced solid gate. To the west lies open rural landscape; to the south is a busy dual carriageway; modern housing development lies to the north and east.

Dating and Historical Background

The terrace presents a dating puzzle. A datestone on the south facade of the terrace bears the date 1867, yet the terrace appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, nine years earlier. The datestone is not in its original position — an early survey photograph clearly shows a window where the datestone now sits, and first survey records from 1973 note that it was at that time detached and lying in the back yard of one of the houses. It is therefore quite possible that the datestone originated from a different structure on the estate altogether.

The terrace does not appear separately in Griffith's Valuation of 1856 to 1864, though this is not conclusive, as estate buildings were often subsumed within the overall valuation of the estate rather than listed individually. When the cottages first appear in the Annual Revisions in 1866, all the dwellings are recorded as vacant, which may suggest they had only recently been completed internally. On balance, a construction date in the mid-1850s best reconciles the conflicting evidence and is consistent with the physical appearance of the buildings.

The terrace of thirteen dwellings, with outbuildings to the rear and a reading room, stood on the northern edge of the Clandeboye Estate. To the north was a shelter belt of trees known as the Walmer Screen, and to the east a wooded area called Walmer Grove — both named after Walmer, a Cinque Port of which Lord Dufferin served as Warden. Correspondence from 1869 between Lord Dufferin and Mortimer Thomson concerning the allocation of estate cottages may relate to these buildings.

From 1866 onwards, the Annual Revisions record the dwellings as leased from Lord Dufferin and Clandeboye, each valued at £3 10s, with numerous changes of occupier and occasional periods of vacancy — consistent with their use as estate workers' cottages. In 1874, the valuation was raised to £4, suggesting improvements were made at that time. The architect is unknown, though both Benjamin Ferrey and William Henry Lynn were working with Lord Dufferin during the 1850s and 1860s and are therefore possible candidates.

The cottages are shown on the 1901 Ordnance Survey map captioned as "Red Cottages", a reference to an original brick frontage. However, the estate office records that the terrace was always known internally as "Red Row"; the now-rendered dwellings are today called Clandeboye Cottages. Each cottage was originally designed with an open porch, but these were enclosed by bringing the front doors forward prior to the first listing survey in 1973. Originally, each house also had a front garden and a small rear plot for growing vegetables.

The row of sheds at the rear of the cottages appears on the 1858 Ordnance Survey map and is therefore 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 walls, taking down and rebuilding chimneys, and connecting the houses to sewers and electricity, as well as replacing front and back doors. Since then, gas heating has been introduced, and copper pipework is visible on the rear elevations.

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

Significance

Although this particular cottage has been modernised, its architectural detailing survives and contributes directly to the group value and character of the terrace as a whole. The terrace is a good example of Victorian estate workers' housing and one of only a few such terraces surviving in Northern Ireland. It also carries significance through its association with the Clandeboye Estate and the Dufferin family.