4 Harker's Hill, Cornascriebe Road, Portadown BT62 3SS

This is a small, single-storey vernacular house built around 1871 as part of a group of six mill workers' dwellings. It forms the eastern end of a short canted row of four similar but non-identical houses, which shares a communal yard with a contemporary pair of semi-detached dwellings to the north. The group occupies a rural setting at the end of a country lane east of Cornascriebe Road, roughly 1.4 kilometres west of Laurelvale and 3.8 kilometres west of Tandragee. This type of grouped rural worker housing is now increasingly rare, particularly where dwellings face each other across a shared lane and yard.

The house is roughly square in plan with lime-washed brick frontage and a double-pitched natural slate roof. The front and east gable walls are constructed in brick finished with lime wash, with a painted stone plinth to the front. The rear wall is finished in lined cement render. The roof has a small fixed skylight to the rear side, clipped eaves without overhangs, and rainwater goods of replacement uPVC. Two brick chimneysstacks with corbelled caps rise either side of the ridgeline; both were once fully rendered, though much of the render has been lost.

The front façade is asymmetrical. On the left side is a flat-headed door opening with a plain timber sheeted door. On the right are two flat-headed window openings, each with a 2/2 timber sash frame and painted stone sills. The eastern gable wall is blank. The rear façade has a flat-headed window opening on either side, each with a 2/2 timber sash frame. Both externally and internally, the detailing and layout remain largely intact and untouched.

The dwellings were developed by Charles Moneypenny and originally housed workers employed in a mill to the rear of the present No. 14 Cornascriebe Road, the remains of which are still extant. The group of houses was developed around 1871, though historical evidence suggests the western half of the southern row may have incorporated or replaced an earlier building shown on Ordnance Survey maps of 1835 and 1860. The eastern half and the northern semi-detached pair appear to have been constructed as new builds in 1871. The houses later passed to the Sinton family, another prominent mill-owning family, around 1903, though the mill had ceased working by that time. The lease of the whole group was acquired by the present owner's ancestor around 1930, and the freehold around 1965.

No. 4 itself was occupied by Andrew Woods from 1871 to 1887, then James McDonald until 1904. Andrew Woods occupied it again from 1904, with the property listed as vacant between 1906 and 1908. Joseph Loudon then occupied it from 1908 to 1915, followed by Patrick Carr from 1915 to 1957. The valuers recorded R. Brown as the occupant from 1957 onwards, though the current owner states that Cecil Trainor, a lorry driver, lived there until around 1964. The property was recorded as vacant in 1965 and, like most of its neighbours, has remained so since.