Walled Garden and Vine House, at Holy Hill House, 78 Ballee Road, Artigarvan, Strabane, Co. Tyrone, BT82 0AA

Walled Garden and Vine House, Holy Hill House, Artigarvan

This is an extensive walled garden dating from around 1840, situated to the south of Holy Hill House, a country house with demesne located north-east of Strabane town. The garden and its associated structures form a key part of the Holy Hill demesne and are listed together with the other buildings on the estate, with which they share group value.

The garden consists of a rectangular enclosure with rubble stone walls set in lime mortar, standing approximately 9 to 10 feet high. The north and west walls are lined with red brick on their inner faces. The walling is well maintained throughout.

Several later 19th-century and 20th-century structures abut the inner face of the enclosure walls:

Vine House: A single-storey lean-to glazed timber vine house runs along the north wall. It is rectangular in plan, with a red brick plinth wall supporting a glazed timber frame above a continuous concrete sill. Access is at the east end via a half-glazed timber door. A corrugated tin boiler house is connected to the vine house on the north side of the wall.

Sunken Glasshouse: A single-storey glasshouse, rectangular in plan and aligned roughly north to south, sits within the garden. Red brick foundation and plinth walls support a glazed roof with a cast-iron frame and painted angled ridge tiles; the eaves are timber. Access at the north end is through a timber door with four glazed panes in the top panel and timber sheeting in the lower panel.

Corrugated Metal Potting Shed: A single-storey corrugated metal structure, rectangular in plan and aligned north to south, is located on the western outer face of the walled garden. It is a lean-to form with painted timber single-glazed casement windows. The interior was not accessible at the time of inspection.

The interiors of the glass houses retain their original heating systems for raised beds, which remain intact. Together, these ancillary structures provide tangible evidence of a once-thriving, commercially self-sufficient estate, and their survival is considered of considerable importance within the context of Strabane. The glass houses display good proportions and are good examples of small Victorian glasshouses, a type now increasingly rare.

The walled garden appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1856. At that date, the vine house is the only internal structure shown. The sunken glasshouse does not appear until the third edition map, making it a mid-20th-century addition.

The Holy Hill estate has a long history of improvement and cultivation. John Sinclair, owner from 1718 to 1770, is likely to have cultivated and improved the estate and enlarged the house during the 1730s and 1760s. His son George, who inherited in 1770 and held the estate until 1804 and had been apprenticed as a linen merchant, continued to cultivate the land and likely established a mill after 1779. The estate was then greatly developed under the ownership of George's nephew James, a Justice of the Peace, who held it from 1804 to 1865. Many of the estate buildings were erected during his tenure, including the walled garden, which appears to date from the latter part of his ownership. James was praised in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs as "the only resident proprietor [in the parish of Leckpatrick]" whose "skill in every department of agriculture enabled him to suggest the most effectual means of improvement, whilst his liberality induced him to supply in a great measure the means. The woods of Holyhill yielded timber for [his tenants'] houses and farming implements and its nurseries provided quicks and trees for their gardens and fences, to ask for which was as great a source of satisfaction to the donor as to receive it would have been to others." James's son William, a former High Sheriff of County Donegal in 1854 who became Deputy Lieutenant of Tyrone in 1876, also likely made further improvements to the estate until his death in 1896. It is considered highly likely that subsequent owners did not embark on any new projects of significance.

The walled garden is set within the wider demesne of Holy Hill House. Materials throughout are as follows: the walling is rubble stone and red brick; the glasshouses are constructed of red brick, timber, cast metal, and glass; and the potting shed is corrugated metal.