St. Patrick’s Church, Glen Park Road, Gortin, Co.Tyrone, BT78 4PF

St. Patrick's Church stands as a free-standing gable-fronted single-storey stone church built around 1856 to designs by architect Joseph Welland, replacing an earlier Lower Badoney church of 1730. Located on an elevated corner site at Glen Park Road and Main Street in Gortin, County Tyrone, the building occupies a prominent position opposite the entrance to Beltrim Castle and is surrounded by other significant structures including the former rectory (now the Ulster Bank) and the former Beltrim National School to the west.

The church faces west and presents a steeply pitched natural slate roof with roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles. Stone ashlar fractable to all gable ends rests on corbelled kneeler stones. The principal west gable is topped with a stone ashlar bell-cote featuring offsets to the base and a short buttress rising from a secondary gable wall with offset stones. The bell-cote itself displays a shouldered bell arch containing an iron bell with fleur-de-lys mouldings to the coping. Cast-iron box-guttering sits on convex sandstone corbels with cast-iron downpipes.

The building is rectangular in plan, seven windows wide, constructed in rough hewn rubble stone walling with tooled ashlar quoins at all corners, an ashlar splayed plinth course, and a projecting string course below sill level. Low level diagonal buttresses occupy all corners except the rear gable, which has a buttress extending in line with the gable. The rear east gable features cement rendering and a blind trefoil panel, with some cement strap-pointing visible at the entrance porch and south elevation.

The church displays three gabled projections to the rear (east) gable. Gothic window openings are formed in flush chamfered sandstone ashlar, arranged in pairs to the north and south nave elevations and to the rear gables of the lower east projections. A large tripartite arrangement of gothic window openings punctuates the rear east gable. The windows feature cast-iron quarry glazing with margin lights, etched and coloured glass to some windows and stained glass to others. One window on the north elevation was created by J.B. Capronnier of Brussels in 1872. Trefoil openings appear above paired window openings to both lower rear gables.

The front west gable incorporates a projecting secondary gable wall with offset head and a single buttress rising to meet the bell-cote. Either side of this projecting wall stands a single window opening. The gabled entrance porch below contains a single window opening to the gable, a paired opening to the south side, and a gothic door opening to the north side. The door features a hood moulding, deeply splayed stone ashlar surround, and double-leaf tongue-and-groove wood-grained timber doors with iron furniture, opening onto a large stone step and wrought-iron boot scraper.

The north side elevation is seven bays wide with all windows arranged in pairs. A vestry door opening features a shouldered pseudo arch in chamfered sandstone ashlar and a tongue-and-groove wood-grained timber door with iron furniture, opening onto a stone platform and steps. The south side elevation mirrors the north elevation in its fenestration arrangement.

The church retains all its original features and displays a high degree of nineteenth-century craftsmanship. The setting encompasses a substantial churchyard enclosed by a rubble-stone wall with stacked coping containing many stone and marble grave markers dating from the early nineteenth century to present, including several box-tombs. Access is provided via a gravel drive opening onto Glen Park Road to the northwest, accessed through a pair of cast-iron gates set into sandstone ashlar piers, with a further pedestrian iron gate opening onto Main Street, Gortin through a stone arch opening.

The building is first recorded on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1905–6. Griffith's Valuation of 1858 records the site as a "church, national school house and graveyard" with a building valuation of £38. The church holds a strong historic association with the Cole-Hamilton family of Beltrim Castle.