Lodge, 68 Dunbarton Street, Loughans, Gilford, CRAIGAVON, BT63 6HJ

This is a single-storey, three-bay, classically styled gate lodge built around 1845 to designs attributed to the architect Thomas Jackson. It sits on Dunbarton Street adjacent to the Gilford Presbyterian Meeting House, to the northwest of the village centre, and was originally one of two gate lodges serving Dunbarton House, the former residence of Hugh Dunbar.

The lodge has a rectangular plan form with a hipped natural slate roof featuring leaded hips and ridge. The eaves project and are supported by paired brackets. Rainwater goods are in cast iron with an ogee moulded profile. The chimney is smooth rendered with a moulded cornice and octagonal clay pots. The walls are finished in stucco render with horizontal rusticated channelling framed by Doric pilasters that rise to a blank frieze.

The windows are segmental arched, bi-partite casements with margin panes, set into moulded segmental arched recesses with plinth blocks and channelled voussoirs. The painted masonry cills have moulded brackets beneath. The door is segmental arched timber with moulded surrounds and plinth blocks, bolection moulded lower panels, and upper glazing that matches the windows; it retains its brass and cast-iron ironmongery, though the step is a replacement in tile. The door is framed by an Ionic portico, with single columns supporting an entablatured pediment.

The principal elevation faces southwest and is symmetrically arranged, with the door centrally placed and a single window to each side. The northwest elevation is also symmetrically arranged but has a single blanked window recess. The southeast elevation has a single window centrally placed. The rear elevation is entirely abutted by a flat-roofed two-storey extension of no architectural interest; two rooflights are present on the rear roof pitch.

The front of the lodge is enclosed by a small hard-landscaped garden bounded by a masonry wall, beyond which lies a busy thoroughfare. A double-height rubble masonry wall retaining the remains of a Doric pilaster moulding defines the boundary between the lodge and the church to the east. The Presbyterian Church overlooks and dominates the immediate setting. A large two-storey flat-roofed extension to the rear, constructed during the 20th century, has a significant impact on the overall proportions and setting of the lodge, and various other external and internal alterations have further detracted from its architectural and historic interest.

The lodge forms part of the group of buildings associated with Dunbarton House and is considered by Dean, in The Gate Lodges of Ulster (1994), to be the work of Thomas Jackson, who is also the probable architect of the main house. Thomas Jackson designed a number of houses for wealthy clients in the area during this period.

Dunbarton House itself was built around 1845 by Hugh Dunbar (1789–1847), a member of a linen family whose grandfather had leased a property at Huntley from the Whytes of Loughbrickland, where Hugh had been manufacturing thread and employing hand-loom weavers to produce linen cloth. By 1834, competition from mill-spun yarns produced by the new wet-spinning process forced Dunbar to establish his own spinning mill. He chose Gilford as the location, entered into partnership with John Walsh McMaster of Armagh, and Dunbar McMaster and Co spinning mill opened in 1839. The mill became one of the largest in Ireland during the 1840s and was the principal driver of economic growth and social development in Gilford throughout the 19th century.

Hugh Dunbar died in 1847, shortly after completing the mansion. In 1858, John Walsh McMaster bought out Dunbar's surviving relatives, acquiring both the mill and Dunbarton House, which became his residence from at least 1860. Griffith's Valuation lists the house as McMaster's residence, valued at £67, and records a two-and-a-half storey house with a porch flanked by single-storey bays, eight outbuildings, and the two gate lodges. The second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858 shows the house, captioned, within substantial grounds, with a row of outbuildings to the rear and a formal garden to the southeast. The gate lodge itself first appears, uncaptioned, on the same second edition map, and its dimensions are recorded in Griffith's Valuation, though it was not separately valued in the Annual Revisions up to 1930.

John Walsh McMaster died in 1872 and Dunbarton House passed to his eldest son, Hugh Dunbar McMaster, who was resident in the twenty-two-room mansion at the time of the 1901 census, at which point he was fifty-seven years old. He lived there with his Indian-born wife, a Parisian governess, and three daughters aged between seven and fifteen; the couple also had at least two sons who had likely been sent away to school, probably in England. The household employed a cook and two housemaids, and, notably, Hugh Dunbar McMaster — himself an Episcopalian — employed one servant from each of the major religious denominations: Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic.

In 1901, Dunbar McMaster and Co was absorbed, along with the Barbours, into the Linen Thread Company Limited, with production continuing at Gilford until the 1980s. Following Hugh Dunbar McMaster's death in 1907, the house stood vacant for a period before being converted in 1915 into a hospital for wounded soldiers, run by the Ulster Volunteer Force and staffed by the UVF's Nursing Corps. By May 1915 it was providing beds for 214 patients, and in the autumn of 1916 an annex of thirty beds was opened in the nearby Bannvale House. An illuminated address of thanks, signed by Winston Churchill, was sent to Dunbarton House by the War Office.

The last resident recorded in the Annual Revisions was John Archibald Dickie in 1921. The house subsequently became the property of the Moodie family, Mr Moodie being the proprietor of the mill. The main house remains in private ownership and is still in domestic use. The gate lodge is no longer part of the estate and is now a privately owned dwelling.