Conservatory, Dunbarton House, 70 Dunbarton Street, Loughans, Gilford, CRAIGAVON, BT63 6HJ

Conservatory at Dunbarton House, built circa 1890

This elongated single-storey multi-bay conservatory was built around 1890, some years after the main house, as part of improvements carried out to Dunbarton House by Hugh Dunbar McMaster towards the end of the 19th century. It forms an integral part of a group of ancillary structures set within the surrounding landscape, and is a good surviving example of its type, largely unaltered and retaining its essential character and historic fabric, though some replacement elements detract slightly from its overall integrity. The conservatory is sited to the west of the main house, abutting the walled yard and outbuildings.

Architectural Description

The structure is timber-framed with lean-to and hipped glazed roofing. Single-span rafters are supported on timber wall-plates, and each bay comprises four strips of lapped glazed sheets with high-level glazed casement vents. The tripartite glazed windows have masonry cills set on a smooth rendered plinth. Every other bay has a central casement pivot-hinge window. Cast-iron rainwater goods are used throughout, and there are replacement uPVC double doors.

The principal elevation faces southeast and is symmetrically arranged, featuring an enlarged hipped-roofed semi-octagonal bay flanked by matching six-bay lean-to wings on either side. The left gable is glazed and includes a single timber door with a margin-paned upper glazed panel. The right gable mirrors the left. The rear elevation consists of a smooth rendered double-height wall enclosing the rear courtyard of the main house.

Setting

Immediately in front of the conservatory is a small private garden enclosed on all sides, beyond which lie extensive landscaped grounds. To the rear of the building complex are outbuildings and stables associated with the main house, all in close proximity.

Historical Context

Dunbarton House itself dates from around 1845 and is attributed to the architect Thomas Jackson, on the basis of its stylistic resemblance to Huntly House, Milltown House, and Belmont, all of which date from the 1830s and 1840s. The house was built by Hugh Dunbar (1789–1847), a member of a linen-manufacturing family whose grandfather had leased a property at Huntley from the Whytes of Loughbrickland, where he manufactured thread and employed hand-loom weavers to produce linen cloth. Faced in 1834 with increasing competition from mill-spun yarns produced by the new wet-spinning process, Hugh Dunbar chose Gilford as the centre of a new enterprise, and the spinning mill opened there in 1839. He later formed a partnership with John Walsh McMaster of Armagh.

The settlement of mill and housing built by Hugh Dunbar became known as Dunbarton, as shown on the third-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1901–2. It was one of a number of planned industrial villages established in Ireland in the early Victorian period, comparable to Sion Mills and Bessbrook. Hugh Dunbar died in 1847, shortly after completing the mansion. By 1858, John Walsh McMaster had bought out Dunbar's surviving relatives and acquired both the mill and Dunbarton House, which was his home from at least 1860. He is first listed as its occupant in Griffith's Valuation at a rateable value of £67, with the house described as a two-and-a-half-storey building with a porch flanked by single-storey bays, eight outbuildings, and two gatehouses.

The second-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858 shows the house set in substantial grounds with a row of outbuildings to the rear and a formal garden to the southeast. By the third edition of 1901–2, the outbuildings had been extended to form a courtyard to the rear, and the conservatory had been added to the southeast of the main house — its earliest known cartographic appearance.

John Walsh McMaster died in 1872, and the property passed to his eldest son, Hugh Dunbar McMaster. At the time of the 1901 census, Hugh was 57 years old and resident in the 22-room mansion with his Indian-born wife, three daughters aged between 7 and 15, and a small household staff comprising a Parisian governess, a cook, and two housemaids. He also had at least two sons, likely away at school in England. Notably, Hugh Dunbar McMaster, himself an Episcopalian, employed servants from each of the major denominations: Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic. In 1901, Dunbar, McMaster & Co was absorbed, along with the Barbours, into the Linen Thread Company Limited, with production continuing at Gilford until the 1980s.

Following Hugh Dunbar McMaster's death in 1907, the house stood vacant for a time before being converted in 1915 into a hospital for wounded soldiers, run by the Ulster Volunteer Force and staffed by the UVF Nursing Corps. By May 1915 it was providing 214 beds, and in autumn 1916 an annexe of 30 beds was opened at nearby Bannvale House. An illuminated address of thanks, signed by Winston Churchill, was sent to Dunbarton House by the War Office.

The last resident recorded in the Annual Revisions was John Archibald Dickie in 1921. The house subsequently became the property of John D. Barbour, a managing director of the Linen Thread Company, and later of the Moodie family, with Robert K. Moodie as proprietor of the mill. In the First General Revaluation of 1933–34, the house was revalued at £80, noted as rent-free and leased from Dunbar McMaster. A plan and dimensions recorded at that time show the house to have comprised three reception rooms, a cloakroom, kitchen, two pantries, a scullery, four bedrooms, two bathrooms with hot and cold water, three servants' bedrooms, and a servants' bathroom also with hot and cold water. The house made use of the electricity and water supply from the Dunbar McMaster mill.

The conservatory was listed in 1993, at which time it was in need of repair and the southwest section had been demolished. The missing wing was reinstated in 1994.