Lodge, Woodbank, 18 Moyallan Road, Portadown, Co Down, BT63 5JX

Gate Lodge to Woodbank, Moyallon Road, Gilford

This is a gate lodge to the Woodbank estate, built around 1840 and situated on the west side of Moyallan Road at the entrance to Woodbank, north of Gilford. It is an increasingly rare and well-preserved example of a late 18th-century gate lodge, though the date of construction is now understood to be closer to 1840. The lodge is currently in use as a dwelling and remains part of the Woodbank estate.

Architectural Description

The lodge is an asymmetrical two-bay, single-storey building on an L-shaped plan, with a later flat-roof extension to the rear. The roof is hipped and covered in natural slate with terracotta ridge tiles and finials. There are red-brick chimneystacks, one of which carries tall terracotta pots. Cast-iron ogee-profile rainwater goods are fitted to the projecting eaves. The external walls are finished in painted ruled-and-lined render with quoins at the corners.

The principal elevation faces north. At its centre is a six-panelled timber door with brass door furniture set within a moulded architrave. The left-hand bay is taller, with its own hipped roof and a 4/4 timber sliding sash window. To the right is a pair of 1/1 timber sliding sash windows, also set in moulded architraves with projecting sills. The east gable is blank. Some windows to the west and rear elevations have been replaced with uPVC units.

The south (rear) elevation meets the flat-roof extension at a re-entrant angle. This extension has two uPVC windows to its south face. The left cheek of the extension has a uPVC window to the centre and a timber sheeted door to the left; the right cheek was not inspected. The west elevation has a single uPVC window to the centre.

The interior has been fully refurbished, though much of the original architectural detailing elsewhere on the building remains intact and the overall character of the lodge is largely preserved.

Setting

The lodge stands on a gradient descending from the road, at the entrance to the Woodbank estate. It is surrounded by mature trees and farmland, with a paved yard to the west. It has group value with Woodbank house itself.

Historical Background

The lodge first appears, with a caption, on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858. By the time of the third edition (1901–2), the building had already been extended to the rear. Valuation records indicate that remodelling took place approximately between 1860 and 1880, during a period when the estate changed hands. Architectural historian J. A. K. Dean has suggested that the lodge may originally have been a three-bay, single-level structure, and that the left-hand bay was raised at a later date to accommodate a higher floor. The red-brick chimneystacks and the earthenware ridge tiles and apex finials are also thought to date from this later phase of remodelling.

It is worth noting that an earlier gate lodge to Woodbank, shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1834 to the north of the house, had disappeared by 1858, when the current lodge further south along Moyallan Road appears for the first time.

Woodbank itself is a former linen bleacher's house built in the late 18th century by Abraham Atkinson, linen draper of Stramore, on the site of an older house dating from the late 17th century. The lands adjoining Gilford were originally settled by the Kennedy family, who built a house here in 1693 and were farmers and linen bleachers. The Kennedys remained at Woodbank until 1791, when their lands — which included the plots on which Bannvale, Elmfield, and Woodbank now stand — were divided up and the leases sold.

A survey of the townland of Ballymacanallen dating from 1800 shows a two-storey house, at that point without the bow-end visible today, as the property of Abraham Atkinson. He died in 1809, and the house and lands passed to James Christy of Stramore, a partner in the Moyallon Vitriol Company. On Christy's death in 1820, the property passed to his daughter Mary Bell, who lived in New York with her husband Abraham Bell, a Quaker shipping and commission agent. During this period the house appears to have been let to various tenants, including William Dawson, a relative and business associate of the Christy family.

When Mary Bell died in 1832, her husband Abraham Bell inherited Woodbank. The tenant at the time was linen merchant Hugh Law, who built a mill in the village of Gilford around 1830, though this venture was short-lived and the land was subsequently sold to Dunbar McMaster, who built their own spinning mill on a plot further to the north. The Townland Valuation of 1828–40 records Hugh Law as occupier, with the house and offices valued at £34 8s. The valuation lists dimensions for the house and numerous outbuildings, including a lapping room — a large, well-lit room where bleached linen would be measured and folded into lengths before being taken to a linen hall for sale — and a mill house, indicating there was a bleach mill on the site.

The house and land were auctioned in 1861 and purchased by James Dickson of neighbouring Elmfield House for £2,500. Griffith's Valuation lists James Dickson as occupier, though the valuer notes that Dickson's brother-in-law, John Blair, was actually living in the house, described as probably a temporary arrangement. The valuation was initially set at £16, then raised to £25 and subsequently to £42, indicating a programme of remodelling and improvements around this time. The second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858 shows a more substantial rear return to the house compared with the first edition, consistent with these improvements.

Subsequent tenants of Woodbank included Richard Falkner (1869), George G. Tyrrell, solicitor (1870), and in the mid-1870s John George McMaster, brother of Hugh McMaster of Gilford Mill, whose younger brother Henry Barnett McMaster was also resident. The annual rent was said to be £100.

By 1881 the house had been purchased by Joseph Collen, a partner in the building contractors Collen Bros, a firm still in existence and associated with significant Irish buildings including the main hall of the Royal Dublin Society, completed in 1884. From 1886 onwards Collen advertised Woodbank for let or sale in the Belfast Newsletter, describing it as a gentleman's residence of some 51 acres, bordered by the River Bann on one side and the Moyallan Road on the other, with good offices, yard, garden, and land of the best quality under grass, held in perpetuity at an annual rent of £12.

By 1892, Collen Bros had let the house to St John Braddell, a retired first clerk in the Record and Writ Office at the Four Courts in Dublin, who was still present at the time of the 1901 census. It has been suggested that Collen may have made Braddell's acquaintance through Collen Bros' engagement to build a new law library at the Four Courts, completed between 1894 and 1896. Braddell was a native of Cork, living with his wife from Waterford, two adult sons, and a household staff of three young women from County Tyrone — a cook, a housemaid, and a kitchen maid.

By 1906 the house was again vacant. The 1911 census records the tenancy of William James Strain, a farmer, who lived there with his wife, five young children, his mother-in-law, and three farm labourers. Strain remained the tenant until 1921, when the house was taken over by David Huston. Around 1930, Woodbank was bought as a wedding present for Frederick Maynard Sinton, who sadly died in a road accident in 1936. His widow and children continued to live there. The Sintons are descendants of Thomas Sinton, founder of linen manufacturing firm Thomas Sinton and Co. Ltd of Tandragee, which remained active until the early 1990s. The house has since been extended to the rear and its kitchen modernised.