Frizells Cottage, Ardress, Co. Armagh

Frizells Cottage is a single-storey, three-bay gable-ended vernacular lobby-entry house of mud-wall construction, located at Ardress, Co. Armagh, and dating to the late 18th century. The building has an east-west axis and faces south onto the old roadway.

The original cottage measures 13.90m by 5.80m, with mud walls varying in thickness from 0.45m to 0.65m, standing to a maximum height of 2.10m along transverse walls and around 4.90m at the gable ends. The walls exhibit a pronounced batter, suggesting they were constructed by the early technique of piling up successive layers of mud, allowing each to dry, and then paring down to the desired thickness, rather than using wooden framing or shutters. This paring-down technique suggests a late 18th-century rather than early 19th-century date.

The front elevation, rendered in modern pebbledash, contains four windows and a door. The front door opening measures 1.86m by 1.00m and is set within an open brick porch measuring 2.20m high, 1.80m wide and 0.40m deep, rendered and presently painted black. The porch has a small pitched canopy of corrugated iron, cat-sliding from the main roof pitch and probably replacing a wooden original. The door itself is missing. The four front windows have modern cement surrounds painted black, stone sills, and outer wooden frames. Only the east window retains its original wooden frame with one pane over one and a top-opening casement; the other three windows formerly had sliding sashes. All windows are fitted with steel cages to prevent access while allowing ventilation.

The rear elevation, rendered in wet-dash lime as the entire exterior would once have been, contains three windows, all fitted with steel cages. The central window has a metal casement frame, while the two outer windows have modern wooden frames with one-over-one lights, the upper being top-hung.

Two brick chimney stacks serve the building. The roof is covered with corrugated iron, which conceals a thatched roof with a scraw underthatch. The roof is currently supported by purlins of squared 20th-century softwood embedded in the gables and internal transverse wall, which must have replaced earlier, more fragile purlins. The ridge has been given additional support by the insertion of a long conifer trunk in the 20th century. The common rafters and cross battens, however, are of much earlier date, composed of poor-quality timbers, largely branches and bog timbers, supporting a thick layer of scraws—turf and grass sods laid overlapping at their tops and bases. The presence of these scraws indicates that the thatch was originally held in place by an external network of ropes.

To the rear of the original cottage is a small kitchen added in the 1950s. A 1950s extension of concrete blockwork has been added to the west end, measuring 6.80m by 8.25m, with walls around 0.15m thick and standing to approximately the same height as the old cottage. This extension, sometimes known as the "new cottage", is built as a kitchen with a flat roof of very slight pitch. Its front elevation, slightly set back from the line of the old façade, has two windows flanking a central door; only the timber surround of the door survives in place. Both windows measure 1m by 0.95m and contain metal frames with external cement sills. There are no openings on the gable or west side. The rear extensions contain two metal windows and a back door with a modern panelled door.

On the east end of the old cottage stand the ruins of an old byre measuring 4.75m by 4.95m, built of stone rubble walls 0.35m to 0.45m thick. The byre, now heavily overgrown with ivy and bushes, is entered from the rear or north side and has no openings in its east and south-facing walls; it formerly had a pitched roof. Adjacent to the byre is a garage of concrete blocks, measuring 2.5m by 5.30m, probably built in the 1960s and constructed as a lean-to structure open on the south elevation.