Torr Head Signal Station, & Coastguard Houses, Cushendun, Co Antrim

Torr Head Signal Station & Coastguard Houses, Cushendun, Co Antrim

Signal Station

The signal station is reached by a steep unmade footpath from a car park at the end of a single-track road. It is a single-storey rectangular building aligned east-west, with a full-height canted bay at the east end facing the sea and a lower porch on the south wall. Both the main building and porch are covered with flat reinforced-concrete slabs waterproofed with tar, bordered by low red-brick parapets with projecting concrete copings. The roof design was intended to collect rainwater, which fed through a cast-iron downpipe fixed to the north wall into a cement-rendered concrete cistern in the yard; this cistern is now topped with a modern plastic tank. Two red-brick chimneys sit over the internal party walls, both with concrete copings and terracotta stacks, the latter probably relatively modern. Towards the east end of the roof, just behind the bay extension, is a circular metal bracket on four legs that probably once supported a flagpole, which appears also to have been braced by cables to metal cleats still embedded in the ground on both sides of the building. A cast-iron stairway leads up to the roof on the east side of the porch.

The walls are now pebble-dashed, obscuring their original material (probably random rubble or brick), and sit on a projecting base with a chamfered red-brick top course. Quoins and door and window surrounds are trimmed with stepped red-brick. All windows have flat brick heads and dressed sandstone cills. Although the wooden frames are now heavily decayed, enough remains to show that they originally had one-over-one panes (top-hung top panel and side-hung bottom panel); these are almost certainly much later replacements. Two stone steps lead up to the main entrance on the west wall of the porch. The door consists of vertical vee tongue-and-groove boards, now metal-sheeted. A single window is on the south wall. To the left of the porch is a single window to the middle room. The west wall has a pair of windows to the end room. On the north wall is a single light to the middle room. A door formerly led at the left into the east room, but this has been blocked and rendered over. The canted bay retains a window in each of its two side cants, but a later extension has been added in the middle.

Just beyond and to the north of the bay window is a small shed with concrete-brick walls and flat concrete roof, accessed by concrete steps down from either side. Its three sea-facing walls each have small rectangular lights. Its style suggests a Second World War construction date, and it was most recently used as a toilet cubicle by the station's occupant. Immediately to its south is a low circular concrete block, now partly covered by a wooden extension to the bay, with metal lugs projecting from its top; what was mounted on it and when remains unknown.

Abutting the inside face of the station's boundary wall at the north-west is a small random rubble shed with a flat concrete roof, pebble-dashed walls, and red-brick quoins and door reveals. It is divided into two sections, one containing a dry toilet. This building first appears on the 1922 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, indicating it was erected between 1903 and 1922.

The station is surrounded by a low random rubble basalt wall. The main entrance is a pedestrian gate on the landward side, from which a concrete footway leads to the entrance. This gate has dressed square piers coped with red sandstone. A smaller gate along the north wall gives access to concrete stairs (on a random rubble base) leading down to a field below the rocky outcrop on which the station is sited. Maps indicate these stairs were also added between 1903 and 1922.

Coastguard Houses

On the north side of the road towards the signal station stands a terrace of two-storey dwellings, aligned north-south with its main facade facing west. It comprises four single-bay units of identical size and a larger single-bay unit at the south end, which projects from the main facade; the latter was undoubtedly occupied by the commanding officer and his family. The terrace is accessed at the south-west through a gateway with square ashlar piers coped with sandstone. A smaller entrance, now infilled, is at the south-east corner of the yard wall. The roof has entirely disappeared, most probably lost in a fire in 1920, but the absence of gables indicates it was hipped. The walls are of coursed random rubble basalt over a projecting base edged with chamfered sandstone, with cement-dashed external surfaces. Most of the terrace's east wall has collapsed.

Each of the four smaller houses has a single window on each floor of the main facade. All have jambs and segmental heads of yellow-brick (but with red-brick reveals) and chamfered sandstone cills. From what little remains, it appears there was also a rear ground-floor door and window and possibly at least one first-floor window. Although the internal masonry party walls survive, all internal floors, stairs, and any stud partitions have long since disappeared.

The facade of the larger unit at the south has, at ground floor, a door at right and two windows at left trimmed like those of the other units. At first floor is a single oriel window at right and two standard windows to the left. The right gable has two windows to each floor, with the upper window at left being an oriel window similar to that on the facade. At the rear is a ground-floor door with a concrete cistern just outside. Traces of a chimney flue appear on the inside face of this wall. Both oriels are of mass concrete cast in situ and are probably First World War additions.

A coursed random rubble wall encloses a large yard at the rear of the houses. Abutting the inside face of the east curtain wall are the ruinous remains of lean-to outbuildings.

The shoreline of the bay to the south of the headland, where 1830s Coastguard houses originally stood, is now occupied by two modern or refurbished houses and a small harbour with reinforced-concrete walls.