Cherryville, 2 Stockdam Road, Lisburn, County Antrim, BT28 3SD

Cherryville is a detached three-bay two-storey house built around 1840, with the east bay added around 1860. It stands on the east side of Stockdam Road in Lisburn, County Antrim, within a rural landscape that has gradually developed as the town expanded.

The house is rectangular on plan with a single-storey entrance porch with pitched roof at the west and a single-storey extension to the south gable. The pitched roof is finished in natural slate with blue and black clay ridge tiles and four corbelled brick chimneystacks without pots. Rainwater goods are replacement ogee-profile uPVC. Walls are ruled-and-lined smooth rendered. The windows are principally camber-headed timber-framed 2/2 horizontally divided sliding sashes with plastered reveals and projecting masonry cills, though some have been replaced with uPVC.

The principal elevation faces west and is six windows wide with unequal spacing. The ground floor contains three windows on the right, abutted on the left by the single-storey entrance porch, with two windows further left. The first floor has six windows. The entrance porch itself has an unequal pitched roof that was extended northward around 1985. The entrance on the south cheek comprises a timber panelled door with an obscured elliptical window. The north gable of the porch contains a diminished replacement timber casement window to the north cheek. The main north gable is blank.

The rear (east) elevation has two bays on the right containing four windows at ground and first floor levels. A former entrance is evident from close inspection of the render on these two bays. A single bay to the left has a symmetrical arrangement with a replacement timber-sheeted door flanked by replacement uPVC windows, and two sliding sash windows at first-floor level. The south gable is abutted by a single-storey modern extension with a tiled pitched roof, replacement rainwater goods, and red brick walls. This extension has a large multi-pane uPVC window to each elevation. The exposed section of the original south gable is blank.

Associated with the house are series of single-storey and two-storey outbuildings to the east. The most notable is an east-west aligned block located north of the house, with a pitched natural slate roof and roughcast rendered walls. Original timber fenestration is largely intact, including square-headed vertically sheeted timber doors. A farmyard extends further east.

The house sits within an unspoiled rural landscape with an expansive garden to the west and a traditional farmyard to the east. It is accessed from the road to the west through a modest entrance with a low rubble stone plinth wall, timber fence, and hedging. An original cow-tail water pump is located adjacent to the rear entrance.

Historical Record

The house is shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1832–3 as a rectangular structure with an outbuilding to the rear, which appears to have survived. At that time the area was largely rural and dotted with farmhouses. The Townland Valuation of 1828–40 records a house in two parts and outbuildings, all thatched and together valued at £5 16 shillings 8 pence, occupied by James Maze.

By Griffith's Valuation of 1862, an orchard was shown to the west of the property, which remained until around 1920. At that time James Maze rented the 25-acre farm from the Marquess of Hertford. The house and outbuildings were valued at £2 10 shillings, suggesting the dwelling was then much smaller than it is today.

The house appears to have remained in the Maze family. In 1900 it was left by James Maze to his son Andrew Maze. The 1901 census records Andrew Maze resident with two of his eight sisters and Robert Lennon, a farm labourer born in Australia. By 1911, Andrew had married and his sisters were no longer resident, but Robert Lennon continued to work on the farm. Both census returns note the house had eight windows to the front façade, suggesting that two bays to the south are a later addition.

The Maze family was well-known and highly respected in Methodist circles in Lisburn. For two generations, the children and grandchildren of Andrew and Mrs Andrew Maze attended the William Foote Memorial School, which formerly stood to the rear of Seymour Street Methodist Church. During the 1920s and 1930s the pupils included Jimmy, Johnny, Andy, Lily, Kitty, Samuel and Hubert (twins), and Ross. In 1975 a harvest fair was held at Cherryville farm to raise money to clear the debt on Seymour Street Methodist Church.

From the turn of the twentieth century, the area around the farm began to develop. A large mansion, Magheralave House, was constructed to the south, and a reservoir supplying water for Lisburn's expanding population was built to the north-west. In recent years housing development has largely consumed the open farmland.

The farm is first captioned 'Cherryville' on the fourth edition Ordnance Survey map of 1920–1. The entrance porch was not prominent enough to appear on historic six-inch maps and may be a Victorian addition. Some detailing such as glazing and chimneys suggests an early twentieth-century date, which may correspond to when the house was extended to the south. The porch appears to have been extended with an asymmetrical roof, possibly in the late twentieth century, and the single-storey extension to the south is also of late twentieth-century date.