Swimming Pool, Portaferry Road, Mount Stewart, Newtownards, Co. Down, BT22 2RU(?)

Overgrown remains of a 1930s kidney shaped open air swimming pool with the remains of arched gateways and surrounding walling. The pool, which was originally part of the Mount Stewart estate is located on the western side of the Portaferry Road, west of the estate itself. The pool itself is kidney shaped and is now filled in. It has a low banked stone stepped terrace around it with remains of rubble built semicircular arched gateways to the S and E set into a low ‘rounded’ rubble wall. Little can be seen of any of these features, bar sections of the arches, due to rampant vegetation. On the N side of the pool there used to be a stone built pavilion with ‘round headed doorways in projecting return wings at each end of a colonnaded loggia’, but this has been removed recently (c.1995). A set of stone seats, with carvings depicting swans among rushes, also formerly located at the pool side, are within the reception building at Mount Stewart Estate. There is a concrete gun emplacement overlooking the rocky shoreline to the immediate SW side of the swimming pool complex, constructed during World War II. On the S side of the track leading from the Portaferry Road to the pool there is a memorial, in the shape of a Celtic cross, to the departed members of the former household staff of Mount Stewart.