Yardman's House, Holy Hill, 80 Ballee Road, Strabane, BT82 0AA

Yardman's House is an attached two-storey, three-bay farmworker's dwelling dating from around 1810, forming the eastern part of an east-west range at the centre of the farmyard of Holy Hill House, situated north-east of Strabane town. It is part of an extensive farm complex within the demesne of Holy Hill, an estate with Plantation origins. The building is listed alongside the other structures at Holy Hill and carries group value with them; the outbuildings as a whole reflect the development of farming techniques required for the efficient running of a large estate.

The house is rectangular on plan with pitched natural slate roofs and aluminium rainwater goods in a U-profile. The walls are painted smooth render over a contrasting base course, with a painted cement-rendered chimney stack. Windows are 6/6 replacement timber sash windows with painted masonry sills. The north and south elevations each have three irregularly spaced openings per floor, including a replacement timber sheeted door. The east elevation has two windows. The west elevation abuts the barn with cellars. The building retains its original style and proportions and has been well maintained, though with some isolated sympathetic replacements. It was sympathetically refurbished in the late 20th century.

The building sits within a farmyard setting to the west of the main house. The concrete farmyard and associated outbuildings are set within a demesne of parkland, pasture and gardens.

According to the current owner, the house was built to provide accommodation for a yardsman or coachman, and it abuts the barn with cellars. The structure appears on all three editions of the Ordnance Survey map (1833, 1854, and 1905). Griffith's Valuation of 1856–64 records a range of outbuildings on the estate including two dairies, a granary house, a coach house, a fowl house, a boiler shed, two stables, a shed, a cow house, and two offices.

The Holy Hill estate has a well-documented ownership history. John Sinclair, who owned the estate from 1718 to 1770, cultivated and improved it and had the house enlarged in the 1730s and 1760s. In 1736 he commissioned William Starrat to draw up a map of the estate, though this omitted all buildings. His son George, who had been apprenticed as a linen merchant and owned the estate from 1770 to 1804, continued to cultivate it and likely established a mill after 1779. An estate map in the Abercorn papers, dated 1804, captions the property as "Holly Hill George Sinclair Esq." but again omits buildings. Under George's nephew James, a Justice of the Peace who owned the estate from 1804 to 1865, it was greatly cultivated and many estate buildings were erected, including the walled garden. James's son William — a former High Sheriff of County Donegal in 1854 who became Deputy Lieutenant of Tyrone in 1876 — also likely improved the estate until his death in 1896, after which no further significant changes are thought to have been made.

The Ordnance Survey Memoirs praise James Sinclair at length as "the only resident proprietor" in the parish of Leckpatrick, crediting his agricultural skill and liberality with the prosperity of the estate and its farming community.

On the basis of inspection, the farmyard appears to have been largely constructed in a single phase of improvement, with some later additions. While the vernacular character of the buildings makes precise dating difficult, their appearance suggests an early 19th-century date, consistent with the improvements recorded under James Sinclair from 1804 onwards.