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

Number 12 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 dwellings erected for the Clandeboye Estate. It sits on the north side of the main Belfast to Bangor Road, directly opposite the entrance to the Clandeboye Estate, in the townland of Ballyleidy.

The cottage has a pitched natural slate roof with intermediate bands of fish-scale courses and clay ridge tiles. The chimney has been replaced in red brick. Cast-iron rainwater goods are retained throughout, comprising half-circle gutters and circular downpipes, with a uPVC soil and vent pipe to the rear. The walls are smooth rendered with a projecting plinth and corbel course. The windows are replacement timber side-hung single-glazed casements; the ground floor openings have chamfered flush cills with moulded sandstone surrounds and mullions, while the first floor has plain chamfered surrounds and cills. The front door is timber, set within a Tudor-arched opening with moulded surrounds and a fixed light over.

The principal elevation faces west and is asymmetrically arranged. The front door is positioned to the right. To the left is a tripartite ground floor window with painted mullions, surrounds, and horizontal timber glazing bars. Above this sits a wall-head dormer containing a bipartite window with horizontal glazing bars. The left elevation is abutted by number 13 Clandeboye Cottages. The rear elevation is principally symmetrically arranged, built in red brick laid in English garden wall bond. A replacement rear timber door is centrally located, flanked by camber-headed arched sash windows at both ground and first floor levels. The right elevation is abutted by number 11 Clandeboye Cottages.

The cottages were originally designed with an open porch area, but the front doors were brought forward to enclose this space before the terrace was listed in 1973. The buildings are captioned "Red Cottages" on the 1901 Ordnance Survey map, a reference to an original brick frontage, though the terrace has always been known locally as "Red Row" and the now-rendered dwellings currently go by the name of Clandeboye Cottages. In 1985, extensive repairs and improvements were carried out, including replacing internal doors and frames, replacing floorboards, removing kitchen units and walls, taking down and rebuilding chimneys, connecting the houses to sewers and electricity, and replacing front and back doors. Since then, gas heating has been introduced and copper pipework is visible to the rear elevations.

The setting includes a garden to the front and a yard to the rear. The yard contains terraced outbuildings in red brick with slated pitched roofs, comprising a former toilet and storage, reached via a timber ledge-and-braced solid gate. A row of sheds running behind the cottages appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858 and is therefore contemporary with the cottages themselves. 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.

The dating of the terrace has presented researchers with some difficulty. A datestone visible on the south facade of the terrace bears the date 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 — a first survey photograph clearly shows a window in the location where the datestone now sits, and 1973 survey records note that at that time the datestone was detached and lying in a back yard. It is therefore quite possible that the datestone originated from another structure on the estate rather than from this terrace. While the possibility cannot be entirely ruled out that the buildings were added to the map at a later date, this practice was generally confined to railway lines and their ancillary buildings, not to workers' housing beyond the immediate railway curtilage. The terrace does not appear in Griffith's Valuation of 1856–64, though this is not conclusive, as estate buildings were frequently included within the overall valuation of an estate without being separately identified. When the buildings first appear in the Annual Revisions in 1866 they are listed as vacant, which may suggest they were newly completed internally at that time. A construction date in the mid-1850s best reconciles the conflicting evidence and is consistent with physical inspection of the terrace.

The architect is unknown, but both Benjamin Ferrey and William Henry Lynn were working with Lord Dufferin during the 1850s and 1860s and are considered possible candidates. Correspondence between Lord Dufferin and Mortimer Thomson dating from 1869, concerning the allocation of estate cottages, may relate to these buildings. The terrace is situated on the northern edge of what was then the Clandeboye Estate, with a shelter belt of trees to the north known as the "Walmer Screen" and a wooded area to the east called "Walmer Grove" — Walmer being the name of a Cinque Port of which Lord Dufferin was warden. Each house originally had a front garden and a small rear plot for growing vegetables. All dwellings were leased from Lord Dufferin and Clandeboye and were valued at £3 10s, a figure raised to £4 in 1874, indicating improvements were made to the properties at that time. The cottages remain in the ownership of the Clandeboye Estate and are, in many cases, still the homes of estate workers or their descendants, giving a remarkable continuity of use from the time they were first built.

As a mid-terrace unit, number 12 contributes to the group value and architectural interest of the complete terrace of thirteen, which is considered a good example of estate workers' housing and one of only a few such terraces surviving in the Province. Its significance is further enhanced by its associations with the Clandeboye Estate and the Dufferin family.