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

2 Clandeboye Cottages is a one-and-a-half storey, single-bay, mid-terrace Victorian workers' cottage built around 1855, one of a terrace of thirteen erected for the Clandeboye Estate on the north side of the main Belfast to Bangor road, directly opposite the estate entrance. It is a good example of estate workers' housing of this type and one of only a few such terraces surviving in the Province. The terrace retains strong historical associations with the Dufferin family and the wider Clandeboye Estate.

EXTERIOR

The roof is pitched natural slate with intermediate bands of fish-scale courses and clay ridge tiles. The chimney is a replacement in red brick. Cast-iron rainwater goods are fitted throughout, comprising half-circle gutters and circular downpipes, with a uPVC soil vent pipe to the rear.

The walls are smooth rendered with a projecting plinth and corbel course. Windows are replacement timber side-hung single-glazed casements. Ground-floor windows have chamfered flush cills with moulded sandstone surrounds and mullions; first-floor windows have plain chamfered surrounds and cills. The front door is timber, set in a Tudor-arched opening with moulded surrounds and a fixed light above.

The principal (south-facing) elevation is asymmetrically arranged, with the front door positioned to the left. To the right is a tripartite ground-floor window with painted mullions and surrounds and horizontal timber glazing bars. Above this window is a wall-head dormer containing a bipartite window with a horizontal glazing bar.

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

The left elevation abuts number 2A Clandeboye Cottages and the right elevation abuts number 1 Clandeboye Cottages.

SETTING

The cottage sits on a steeply sloping site with a garden to the front. To the rear is a yard with terraced outbuildings in red brick under pitched slate roofs, comprising an external toilet and storage. Rear access is through a timber ledge-and-braced solid gate leading to an alleyway shared with the adjoining owner. To the west is rural landscape; to the south is a busy dual carriageway; modern housing development lies to the north and east.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The terrace has presented researchers with a dating puzzle. A datestone on the south façade bears the year 1867, yet the terrace appears on the second-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, nine years earlier. The datestone is not in its original position — early survey photographs clearly show a window where the datestone now sits — and a 1973 survey record notes it was found detached and lying in the back yard of one of the cottages. It is therefore quite possible that the datestone originated from a different structure on the estate rather than from this terrace.

The terrace does not appear separately in Griffith's Valuation (1856–64), though this is not conclusive, as estate buildings were frequently absorbed into an overall estate valuation without being individually identified. When the buildings first appear in the Annual Revisions in 1866 they are listed as vacant, which may suggest they had only recently been completed internally. A construction date in the mid-1850s best reconciles the conflicting evidence and is consistent with a physical inspection of the terrace.

The terrace of thirteen dwellings, along with outbuildings to the rear and a reading room, sat on the northern edge of the Clandeboye Estate as it then was. To the north is a shelter belt of trees known as the Walmer Screen, and to the east a wooded area called Walmer Grove — Walmer being the name of a Cinque Port of which Lord Dufferin was Warden. Correspondence from 1869 between Lord Dufferin and Mortimer Thomson concerning the allocation of estate cottages may relate to these buildings.

From 1866 the dwellings were all leased from Lord Dufferin and Clandeboye at a valuation of £3 10s each, with numerous changes of occupier and occasional periods of vacancy consistent with use as estate workers' cottages. In 1874 the valuation was raised to £4, indicating some improvements were made at that time. The architect is unknown, though both Benjamin Ferrey and William Henry Lynn were working with Lord Dufferin during the 1850s and 1860s and are possible candidates.

The 1901 Ordnance Survey map captions the row as "Red Cottages", a reference to an original brick frontage, though the estate has always known the terrace as "Red Row". The now-rendered dwellings currently go by the name of 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, which was enclosed by bringing the front doors forward prior to the 1973 listing survey. The row of sheds running behind the cottages appears on the 1858 Ordnance Survey map and is therefore 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 in many cases continue to be the homes of estate workers or their descendants, giving a remarkable continuity of use from the time they were first built.