Solitude, [?60] Belfast Road, Edenslate, Ballygowan, Co. Down, BT23

Solitude was a two storey farmhouse of possible pre-1834 origin, located on the south-west side of Belfast Road roughly a mile north of Ballygowan, County Down. The house was demolished circa 1987, and two modern dwellings now occupy the general site. Some of the original outbuildings have survived.

At the time of the first heritage survey in November 1973, the house was recorded as a two storey farmhouse with attic. The roof was slated with plain barge boards to the gable ends. Chimneys were rendered. An eaves course was present. The walls were rendered with recent pebbledash finish and featured bevelled stone quoins with a rendered base. The north front had five first floor windows and four ground floor windows, described as drop-hung with horizontal astragals and shouldered cement surrounds. A central doorway had an elliptical arch head with a three-pane fanlight, panelled door, and plain sidelights with a panelled apron and cement surround. The front measured approximately thirty-eight feet. The farmyard adjoining the house contained outbuildings of whitewashed stone rubble. The house was in fair condition at the time of survey.

The building is shown on Ordnance Survey maps of 1834 and 1858, marked as "Solitude" on both instances. The outbuildings were also present on these maps alongside corn and flax mills situated a short distance to the west. The 1834 first valuation survey records that the house and mill buildings were owned by William Gamble with a rateable value of £25-7-0. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1837 refer to the mills as "Knockmasham Mills", describing the corn mill with a breast wheel sixteen feet in diameter and the flax mill with a similar wheel of fourteen feet diameter. The Memoirs note that Gamble owned three quarters of the land within the townland of Edenslate, with the remainder belonging to the Mussenden family of Larchfield.

William Mussenden had acquired both the house and mills by the time of the second valuation around 1863, when the complex was leased to John Bennett with a rateable value of £32. The Bennett family remained in possession of Solitude in 1886. In more recent times the house belonged to a family named McMordie and possibly at some point to a family named McVeigh.

A windmill is indicated near this site on Taylor's and Skinner's 1777 road map of the area, but by the 1830s this appears to have been abandoned. The house was demolished in 1987 according to the current owner of one of the modern dwellings on the site.