Lodge, 21 Moyallan Road, Ballymacanallen, Portadown, CRAIGAVON, County Down, BT63 5NH

Gate Lodge, Elmfield, 21 Moyallan Road, Ballymacanallen, north of Gilford

This is a single-storey gate lodge in the Scots Baronial style, built around 1870 to designs by William Spence, the architect also responsible for Gilford Castle. It stands to the north side of the main entrance to Elmfield, on the east side of Moyallan Road, and forms one of two lodges originally serving that estate. The building has been vacant for approximately five decades and is in a poor state of repair, though important architectural detailing survives.

The lodge is of rectangular plan with a projecting gabled porch to the south. The walls are of ashlar sandstone — described by J. A. K. Dean as punched sandstone ashlar of the highest quality — built on a plinth. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with angled ridge tiles. Rainwater goods are cast iron: ogee pattern on bracketed eaves to the south elevation, with a cast-iron hopper and downpipes; the remaining elevations have cast-iron half-round guttering on drive-in brackets. Windows are 1-over-1 timber sliding sash, currently without glazing, set in smooth surrounds with projecting stone sills.

The principal elevation faces south. To the right of centre is the projecting crow-stepped gable porch, which has a ball finial and contains a plain timber-sheeted door (currently unfixed) with an overlight (no glazing) in a moulded surround. The left and right cheek walls of the porch each have a round-arched slender window. Above the entrance door is a carved stone shield bearing the Dickson family crest: a clasped hand holding a dagger. The porch is flanked by two windows to the left and one to the right. The east elevation has two windows. The north rear elevation has two windows positioned to the far left. The west elevation has two evenly spaced windows. All elevations are severely overgrown and not entirely visible.

The lodge is one of two serving Elmfield. This front lodge served the main entrance, while a second lodge at the head of a driveway led to the stable courtyard at the rear. A gate lodge is shown and captioned on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, though its plan form does not correspond to the present structure, suggesting the lodge was rebuilt during Elmfield's second major remodelling around 1870. The rebuilt structure appears on the third edition map of 1901–2. The front gate lodge is not separately listed in valuation records until the First General Revaluation of 1933–4, when it is recorded as the home of James Mitchell, an employee of Henry Uprichard who held it rent free. The property was then in good repair and comprised a kitchen, scullery, two bedrooms and a basement, with a valuation raised from £1 10s to £4 5s. In 1954 an addition was made and the valuation rose to £7; the occupier at that time was Albert Williamson.

The broader history of Elmfield reaches back to the late 18th century, when the lands belonged to the Christy family, Quakers believed to have introduced the linen industry to this area in the late 17th century. In 1806 James Christy of Stramore granted the Elmfield property to his relative and business partner William Dawson, of the firm Christy and Dawson. An earlier house already stood on the property at that stage — a two-storey structure measuring 38.6 feet by 21 feet with a cellar and various outbuildings including a coach house, potato house and barn, one of which was thatched and another of which had a mud rear wall. This earlier house is the structure shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1834 and listed in the Townland Valuation at £17 16s. Map and field evidence suggest that this Georgian house and its outbuildings were partially incorporated into the present house and stable courtyard. The head rent was purchased in 1832 by James Uprichard of Bannvale, whose family would later become resident at the house.

Newspaper evidence shows that the next occupier, James Dickson, was resident from at least 1851. Remodelling of the house took place around this time, and its altered plan is reflected on the second edition map of 1858, which also shows the two gate lodges for the first time. James Dickson was a partner in the linen firm Dunbar, Dickson and Co., whose factory in Gilford was largely responsible for the town's growth and prosperity in the second half of the 19th century. Dickson is recorded as having purchased the house and lands in 1861, though he had evidently been resident for at least a decade before that. The building present on the site today largely dates from around 1870: stone-cutters were working on the site in 1867 and valuation records confirm that a new house and outbuildings had been completed by 1872, built at a cost of £4,000 by contractor William Barclay and valued at £110. William Spence, identified as the architect by Dean, had also designed Gilford Castle for James Dickson's brother Benjamin Dickson. The construction of Elmfield unfortunately coincided with a downturn in the linen trade, and the Dickson family were eventually forced to sell. Houghton Dickson was the occupier in 1881, but by 1883 the house was vacant and the valuer considered it likely to be let. In 1884 it was purchased by Forster Green, a tea and coffee merchant, for his daughter Emily and her husband Henry Albert Uprichard of the local Quaker linen dynasty.

Elmfield became the main residence of Henry Albert Uprichard and his family, though it is unclear from the 1901 census whether the family were living there or at the nearby Uprichard property at Bannvale. The 1901 census records Henry and his second wife Beatrice, six children from his first and second marriages, Beatrice's mother from Waterford, and four female servants. Henry Albert Uprichard died in November 1901, leaving Elmfield and its estate of 260 acres, together with the plate, pictures, horses, carriages and furniture, to his eldest son William Forster Uprichard. William Forster also received an equal share in the Springvale Bleach Works, which employed around 130 workers at the turn of the 20th century. The 1911 census records William Uprichard, a member of the Society of Friends, living at Elmfield with his wife and two-year-old son Rutledge, who was being raised as an Episcopalian in his mother's denomination. The household staff comprised a parlourmaid, housemaid, cook, nurse and a fifteen-year-old milk boy from County Armagh. The Uprichards lived in considerable style at Elmfield; horses, dogs and hunting were important recreations, and William Forster Uprichard was an accomplished amateur jockey, as was his son Rutledge after him, both winning the title of Irish Amateur Champion. William Forster Uprichard died in 1949 leaving Elmfield to his son Richard Rutledge Kane Uprichard, known as Rut, who died not long afterwards in 1952. The house was subsequently sold to the Shaw family.

In the late 1860s, when Elmfield was first built, the gardens had been planted with rhododendrons, azaleas and specimen trees, with rose gardens around the house and a walled kitchen garden. When the Shaw family purchased the house in 1958 they began to restore the gardens, and in 1989 a Belgian landscape designer, François Goffinet, was commissioned to develop an overall plan. The course of the entrance driveway was altered as part of these renovations.

The setting of the lodge is to the north side of the main entrance to Elmfield, on the east side of Moyallan Road. It is now severely overgrown and barely visible from the road or the main entrance. Despite its derelict condition, Dean's gazetteer includes drawings of the front and side elevations and a full description of the building. The lodge retains special historic interest both in its own right and through its important group value with Elmfield, and it stands as a good surviving example of a mid-19th-century gate lodge by a prominent architect.