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

Number 10 Clandeboye Cottages is a one-and-a-half-storey, single-bay, mid-terrace Victorian workers' cottage built around 1855. It forms part of a terrace of thirteen cottages erected for the Clandeboye Estate on the north side of the main Belfast to Bangor Road, directly opposite the entrance to the estate. The cottage has been modernised but retains its original detailing, which contributes to the group value and character of the terrace as a whole. The terrace is among only a handful of surviving examples of this type of estate workers' housing in the province, and carries additional significance through its association with the Clandeboye Estate and the Dufferin family.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The roof is pitched, covered in natural slate with intermediate bands of fish-scale courses and clay ridge tiles. The chimney is a replacement in red brick. Rainwater goods are cast iron, with half-circle gutters and circular downpipes; there is a uPVC soil and vent pipe to the rear. The external walls are smooth rendered with a projecting plinth and corbel course. Windows are replacement timber side-hung single-glazed casements. The ground floor windows have chamfered flush cills with moulded sandstone surrounds and mullions; the first floor windows have plain chamfered surrounds and cills. The front door sits in a Tudor-arched opening with moulded surrounds and a fixed light above it.

The principal elevation faces west and is asymmetrically arranged, with the front door positioned to the right. To the left at ground floor level is a tripartite window with painted mullions and surrounds and horizontal timber glazing bars. Above this is a wall-head dormer containing a bipartite window, also with horizontal glazing bars. The left elevation adjoins number 11 Clandeboye Cottages, and the right elevation adjoins number 9.

The rear elevation is largely symmetrically arranged, built in red brick in English garden wall bond. A replacement timber rear door is centrally positioned, flanked on each side by camber-headed arched sash windows at both ground and first floor levels.

SETTING

To the front is a garden. The rear has a yard with terraced red-brick outbuildings under slated pitched roofs, comprising an external toilet and storage. Rear access is through a timber ledge-and-braced solid gate. To the west lies open rural landscape; to the south is a busy dual carriageway; and modern housing development lies to the north and east.

HISTORY AND DATING

The date of construction has presented researchers with some difficulty. The terrace bears a datestone inscribed 1867, but the building appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, nine years earlier. The datestone on the south facade is not in its original position; a first survey photograph clearly shows a window where the datestone now sits, and information from 1973 records it as detached and lying in the back yard of one of the houses. There is a strong possibility that the datestone originated from another structure on the estate rather than this terrace. The practice of adding buildings retrospectively to Ordnance Survey maps was common for railway-related structures, but not typically applied to houses outside railway curtilages, lending weight to the 1858 mapping as genuine. The terrace does not appear separately in Griffith's Valuation (1856–64), though this is not conclusive, as estate buildings were often subsumed within the overall valuation of an estate rather than listed individually. When the buildings first appear in the Annual Revisions in 1866, all the dwellings are recorded as vacant, possibly indicating they were newly completed internally at that time. A construction date in the mid-1850s best reconciles the available evidence and is consistent with a field inspection of the terrace.

The terrace of thirteen dwellings, with outbuildings to the rear and a reading room, sits on the northern edge of what was then the Clandeboye Estate. To the north is a shelter belt of trees known as the Walmer Screen, and to the east is a wooded area called Walmer Grove — both names deriving from 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. The architect is unknown, though both Benjamin Ferrey and William Henry Lynn were working with Lord Dufferin during the 1850s and 1860s and are considered possible candidates.

The cottages are recorded as 'Red Cottages' on the 1901 Ordnance Survey map, a reference to an original brick frontage, though the estate always knew them as 'Red Row'. They are now rendered and go by the name Clandeboye Cottages. Each cottage originally had a front garden and a small rear plot for growing vegetables. The cottages were also originally designed with an open porch area, but this was enclosed by bringing the front doors forward prior to the first listing survey in 1973. A row of sheds running behind the cottages is shown on the 1858 map, confirming that the outbuildings are 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 internal walls, taking down and rebuilding chimneys, connecting the houses to sewers and electricity, and replacing front and back doors. Gas heating has since been introduced, and copper pipework is visible on the rear elevations.

The cottages remain in the ownership of the Clandeboye Estate and continue, in many cases, to house estate workers or their descendants, giving a remarkable continuity of use from the time of their construction.