Thatched House., 326 Seacoast Road, Magilligan, Limavady, Co Londonderry

Thatched House, 326 Seacoast Road, Magilligan

This is a fine example of a small late Georgian vernacular thatched house with extended outhouses in line, remarkably complete in structural detail, secondary elements and original furniture. It illustrates the typical layout of a small Magilligan farmhouse complex.

The main house is a smooth rendered and whitewashed three-room thatched building. Thatch covers two of the rooms, while the third room is covered with green painted corrugated metal, which also extends over an adjacent outhouse with a rooflight. Beyond this, the building continues in line with original basalt walls and a natural slated roof, ending in a gable. The entire complex forms the characteristic long range typical of the Magilligan area, with its long axis oriented east to west following the drainage lines towards Lough Foyle.

The thatched section makes a handsome appearance with a central sheeted door and, on either side, widely spaced small-paned Georgian wooden sash windows of nine panes each. A whitewashed chimney stands at each end, with the white rendering extending over the gable wall and the sides of the roped thatch, which is made of rye straw. A black painted plinth finishes the bottom of the wall where the footings project. To the rear, a single nine-pane sash window punctuates the kitchen wall. The thatch on the back slope is somewhat more ragged.

A building is shown on this site on the Ordnance Survey map of 1830–31, though it appears somewhat shorter than the structure visible today, suggesting that the outhouses had not yet been added. The property does not appear in the contemporary valuation records. The 1857 second valuation notes that the house was occupied by John Begley, who leased it from Sir Frederick Heygate, with a rateable valuation of 15 shillings.

According to the occupant in September 1997, who came to live here circa 1917 at age three with her grandparents, the room with the corrugated metal roof is not an extension but a section whose thatch had to be removed after a roof truss cracked. She stated that no significant alterations had been made during her lifetime except for tiling around the fire, and that the property once housed eleven people. The cottage remained virtually unchanged throughout her eighty-year residence.