The Manor House, High Street, Donaghadee, Co Down

The Manor House, High Street, Donaghadee, Co. Down

A large, two-storey gentleman's town residence of approximately 1770–80, possibly containing the fabric of an earlier dwelling of around 1610, and of national importance. The house, its gates, and gate piers are all included within the listing. It stands immediately to the south-east of the town centre, on the east side of High Street at its junction with Manor Street, set slightly back from the pavement behind a small garden enclosed by a low rendered wall and hedge. The building is roughly L-shaped in plan, with later extensions of around 1800 and around 1870.

The principal front elevation faces south-west. At its centre, slightly off-centre, is a panelled front door with a semicircular radial fanlight and sidelights. This is framed by a projecting porch formed by fluted Doric columns on squat square bases, which support an entablature with a projecting cornice. The side panels of the porch are glazed in their upper sections and have moulded timber panels below. To the right of the doorway are two sliding sash windows; to the left are three similar windows. At first floor level there are five equally spaced windows of the same type, all six-over-six panes. The facade is finished in lined render, covered in ivy that is clipped neatly to the level of the first-floor windowsills. The left-hand, north-west gable merges with a single-storey north-west extension, and is composed of two merged blank hipped gables — the north-east of which, the late Victorian extension, is in painted brick, while the north-west gable is finished in painted lined render.

The rear elevation is in two halves. The right-hand half is the rear of the main front range and has four levels: a lower ground floor, a main ground floor level with the front ground floor, a first floor, and an attic floor. The window arrangement here is rather haphazard in composition, comprising a mixture of modern Georgian sashes, tripartite sliding sashes, round-headed windows, and round-headed half-dormers. The left-hand half of the rear elevation has two levels, is largely blank, and merges with a single-storey outhouse, which in turn merges with the north-east Manor Lodge.

The north-west face of the return has a recessed glazed doorway with a fanlight to the right, situated directly beneath an unusual semi-circular bracketed bay window.

The south-east facade is two storeys and features a central two-storey projecting canted bay, probably added around 1800, to the left of which a single-storey flat-roofed bay merges with the main body of the building. At first floor level there are seven sliding sash windows with Georgian panes: two to either side of the canted bay and one to each face of the bay. At ground floor level there is one sliding sash window, taller than those above, to the north-west face of the single-storey bay, with a further sliding sash to its south-east face. To the right is another sliding sash window, then a panelled door with a multi-paned fanlight over it, and to its right another sliding sash (both in the base of the canted bay). To the far right are a further two sliding sash windows.

The front walls are generally finished in unpainted lined render. The rear walls are mainly unpainted roughcast, with the rear of the Victorian extension in painted brick. The roofs are hipped and covered in Bangor Blue slates, with cast-iron gutters and downspouts.

The interior is largely intact and mainly Georgian in character.

The house has its origins in the early 17th century, when Hugh Montgomery acquired the lands around Donaghadee and set about developing the town as a major port. As part of this scheme, Montgomery built himself a large dwelling in the town, reputedly — probably erroneously — its first stone house. Donaghadee takes its name from a medieval manor, and the building became known accordingly as the Manor House. It remained one of the residences of Montgomery's descendants, the Earls of Mount Alexander. Thomas, the fifth Earl, died childless in 1757, and his wife, Marie Angelique, bequeathed the Donaghadee estate to her nephew Samuel De la Cherois. Samuel's son Daniel took possession of the town on the death of the Countess of Mount Alexander in 1771. At that point the Manor House was probably still substantially as built by Hugh Montgomery in the early 17th century, and it appears as such on what is now believed to be James Dillon's map of the town of around 1700 — a map long misdated to 1780 due to an ambiguous numeral, and reproduced under that incorrect date in several publications, most notably John Stevenson's Two Centuries of Life in Down 1600–1800 (republished by White Row Press, 1990). Daniel appears to have radically remodelled and extended the original building not long after 1771, and may also have built the dower house to the rear at the same time. The entrance portico and the canted bay were probably added in the early 19th century by his son, also named Daniel, though the stable extension to the north-west appears to date from the mid-19th century. The last major alteration was the construction of the two-storey brick extension to the rear in the 1870s.

A significant obstacle in researching the building's history is that the bulk of the De la Cherois estate papers remain in private hands and have not been available for consultation. A catalogue of those papers was being undertaken at the time of listing by Anthony Malcomson of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, though it was unclear whether permission for the transcription of documents would be granted.

The house sits within a conservation area and is in private ownership.