St. Patrick’s RC Church, 8 Ballygalet Road, Ballygalet, Cloghy, Newtownards, Co. Down, BT22 1NE

St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church stands on the west side of Ballygalet Road in the small hamlet of Ballygalet, near Newtownards, County Down. The church is a simple, unassuming rural parish church, originally built in 1784 with the assistance of the Savage family of Rock Savage to replace an earlier thatched mass house. It was enlarged in 1835 by Reverend John Maguire and rebuilt in 1878.

The building is a single-storey structure of long, simple design with rough-cast rendered walls and gabled end elevations. The sanctuary gable faces the road to the east. The main elevation faces north, where the principal timber-sheeted entrance door is located on the far right side, framed with pilasters and a semicircular fanlight. To the left of the main entrance are five evenly spaced lancet windows with smooth cement surrounds. A small flat-roofed entrance porch for the priest's access and a boiler room are positioned to the left of these windows, with a stainless steel flue rising from its roof. A larger sacristy extension with a blank gable adjoins to the left.

The west gable features a gabled porch extension with paired lancet windows on its western face, and a small flat-roofed extension with a squat equilateral window. Two lancet windows are positioned high on the main west gable. The south elevation of the main church has seven equally spaced lancet windows. The east gable has a triple lancet window arrangement with the centre window taller than the flanking pair, all windows set on the same cill. The east side of the sacristy has paired lancet windows.

All gables except the sacristy feature cross motif finials. The pitched roofs are covered in Bangor blue slates with dark grey-blue fire clay ridge tiles decorated with fleur-de-lis or shamrock-like motifs. Cast iron gutters and downspouts run throughout. All windows have smooth cement surrounds.

The church is surrounded by a graveyard to the south and west, with headstones dating back to 1839. A low rendered wall runs along the road frontage to the east of the church, with square rendered gate posts topped with square pyramid caps and cast iron gates.

The site has significant historical importance within the broader landscape. Approximately half a mile directly north stands Knockdoo hill, the site of a medieval church and graveyard recorded in 1306 under the name "Ecclesia de Sithe" (Church on the hill). The burial ground there may have remained in use until the seventeenth century, though little trace of the church survives. North of this former burial ground once stood a castle built by Rowland Savage in the early 1600s, of which nothing now remains.