The Grange, Moyallen, Portadown, Co Armagh, BT63 5JZ

The Grange, Moyallen

The Grange is a detached house of Georgian character built around 1800, with significant alterations made around 1900 and again around 1960. It stands on a large, mature rural site east of the Stramore Road, near Portadown, and the listing extends to the house itself, the coach house, and the garden gates. The building is a good example of a small Georgian house that has been extended and adapted over time, and the successive changes illustrate shifting tastes and evolving patterns of domestic use across the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Form and Plan

The house is asymmetrical in appearance, with three bays and two storeys plus an attic. It is arranged on an L-shaped plan. To the rear there is an original full-height return and a two-storey lean-to extension added around 1900. A sun room was added to the south around 1960.

Roof and Rainwater Goods

The roof is pitched and covered in natural slate with terracotta ridge tiles and an overhanging eaves board. The chimneystack are roughcast rendered with capped pots. Cast-iron ogee-profile rainwater goods run along the overhanging eaves.

External Walls and Windows

The walls are finished in painted roughcast render, with a continuous sill course running along the ground floor of the west elevation. The windows are a variety of timber sliding sash types. On the main elevation they are generally tripartite 3-over-6 sashes with dividing pilasters, except where otherwise noted. There is also a canted bay window and an oriel window on the north side.

Principal (West) Elevation

The principal elevation faces west and is three openings wide with a central entrance bay and a projecting gabled bay to the right. The gabled bay contains a tripartite 3-over-6 window at both ground and first floor. The entrance at the centre is formed by a six-panelled raised-and-fielded door with brass door furniture, flanked by Tuscan columns with entasis and surmounted by a frieze with triglyphs. Above the door is a spider-web fanlight. The whole composition is set within an alcove doorcase of ashlar sandstone. At first floor in the entrance bay there is a 3-over-6 window with side-lights. The left bay has a 3-over-6 window at first floor and, at ground floor, a lean-to box bay containing a tripartite 3-over-6 window.

North Elevation

The north elevation has two 2-over-2 windows at attic level. At first floor to the left is an oriel box window with a bracketed base and overhanging eaves, containing three six-paned timber casement windows that open on hinges, with four decorative timber brackets on corbels. To the right at first floor is a 3-over-6 window. At ground floor there is a 2-over-4 window to the left and two 3-over-6 windows to the right. There is also a box bay and a 4-over-4 window on the north elevation.

East (Rear) Elevation

The rear elevation is abutted to the left by the full-height return and then the later addition, which together have three 1-over-1 windows at first floor and two 2-over-2 windows at ground floor. A timber half-panelled door sits at ground floor to the left. The full-height return to the right is abutted at ground floor by a slated lean-to extension, which has a 3-over-6 window to the left and a multi-paned window to the right. The first floor of this section is blank apart from a chimney flue.

South Elevation

At attic level the south elevation has a 2-over-2 window to both left and right. At first floor there is a 6-over-6 window to the left and a 3-over-6 window to the right. At ground floor to the left there is a paired 2-over-2 window, and to the right a modern timber-sheeted door. The ground floor is abutted to the right by the modern lean-to sun room added around 1960, to which a uPVC door and window screen has been added.

Interior

The house contains an iron grate inscribed 'GR III', which may support a construction date during the reign of King George III.

Coach House and Setting

The house sits in a rural location on a large mature site to the south of Stramore House, accessed via a modern farm gate and gravelled driveway. To the east stands a large roughcast rendered, slated coach house that adds considerably to the character of the site.

The west elevation of the coach house has three almost regularly spaced multi-paned timber windows at first floor, with a working clock face at the centre. At ground floor there are three multi-paned windows to the left and a modern timber-sheeted door to the right of centre. The north gable was concealed at the time of survey. The east elevation has been altered to accommodate five sets of timber-sheeted garage doors on rollers, with two multi-paned windows to the left of centre. The south gable has two eight-paned timber casement windows at first floor.

A rubble stone boundary wall with buttresses abuts the north gable of the coach house. The rear garden is enclosed by a roughcast rendered wall with a rubble stone pier to the north. A modern swimming pool lies to the rear of the house and a working orchard is to the east. The garden to the south is enclosed by hedgerow and accessed on three sides via wrought-iron gates. To the west, the site is bounded along the road frontage by a mature hedgerow.

Historical Background

The house appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1834, where it is captioned 'Annaville' and already shown on an L-shaped plan with a linear range of outbuildings to the rear, much as it survives today. The second edition of 1858 shows little change other than the addition of a formal garden to the south. By the third edition the house is captioned 'Moyallan Grange', and it became known as 'The Grange' in the 1930s.

The Townland Valuation of 1828 to 1840 records Annaville as the home of a Mr Matthew Fox. At that time the house and offices were valued at £19 17 shillings. The house measured 43 by 30.6 by 23 feet, with a rear outshot of 19 by 21 by 22 feet. The site also included a long two-storey outbuilding with lofts, a two-storey coach house, and a number of single-storey outbuildings. The two-storey outbuilding and coach house are still present on the site today.

Griffith's Valuation of 1856 to 1864 lists the initial occupier as a Reverend Orr, leasing from James Geo H Fox (in chancery). During the compilation of Griffith's Valuation, the property was acquired by John Grubb Richardson of Moyallon House, who had inherited properties in the Moyallon area on his marriage to Jane Marion Wakefield in 1853. Richardson let the house to a series of tenants, the first being David Mercier, who was the proprietor of a flour mill shown to the south of the house on the 1858 Ordnance Survey map, captioned 'Moyallon Flour Mills'. The property at this time stood in a plot of over nine acres and was valued at £18, later raised to £20. The outbuildings were noted by the valuer as 'not in good repair'. Subsequent tenants included William F Mercier in 1872 and, in 1891, a Mrs Hogg, who won a prize for her cow at the Banbridge annual show that year.

By 1894, the house was occupied by Thomas Wakefield Richardson, son of John Grubb Richardson. In the same year the valuation was raised to £29, with the valuer noting the house had been 'improved'. These improvements included the addition of a double-height extension to the front facade — not shown on the 1858 map — and a veranda wrapping around the building from the entrance door to the north facade, both likely dating to the early 1890s. Historic photographs confirm the veranda, which is now gone. The double-height front extension is considered to be late Victorian in origin on the basis of both mapping and valuation evidence.

In the 1901 census, Thomas Wakefield Richardson described himself as a 'landowner and manufacturer'. He was living in the house with his wife and two servants — a cook and a housemaid. The house had 14 rooms and was designated first class. By the 1911 census, Richardson was temporarily absent, but the household had expanded significantly, with five resident servants: a cook, a lady's maid, a housemaid, a kitchen maid, and a parlour maid. It is suggested that Richardson and his wife Hilda subsequently moved to Moyallon House following the death of his widowed mother in 1909, when the family home became vacant.

At the time of the First General Revaluation in the early 1930s, the occupier was Captain James A Johnston JP, of the linen dynasty associated with Johnston, Allen and Co of Lurgan, leasing from Thomas Wakefield Richardson's widow, Hilda. The valuation was raised to £58 and then reduced to £50 on appeal. In 1934 the accommodation comprised four bedrooms, two dressing rooms, three attics, three reception rooms, a bathroom, a separate WC with hot and cold water, a kitchen, three pantries, and a scullery. The house had its own electricity plant and piped water. A plan from the 1930s confirms the veranda was still in place at that time. Captain Johnston died in 1936. Subsequent occupiers included his widow Margaret Johnston, followed by Samuel Noel Cochrane in 1945, and then Alexander Reginald Wakefield Richardson (1902 to 1984), a grandson of John Grubb Richardson through his daughter Ethel and her husband R H Stephens Richardson. According to Quaker sources, Alexander Richardson and his wife Marianne came to live at The Grange after losing three of their four children, two of them in the same week to typhoid fever. Further alterations were made around 1960 with the addition of the sun room to the south.

Several local sources, including members of the Quaker Society both locally and provincially, maintain that the house was slept in by John Wesley. If correct, this would suggest a construction date in the region of the 1780s, though no written sources have been found to support this claim. The house remains in use as a private dwelling.

The house is likely to have been associated with the Christy and Wakefield families before passing to the Richardsons in the mid-19th century, and may therefore have formed part of the early development of the Moyallon area as a centre of the linen industry, though original sources to confirm this connection are lacking.