Gate Lodge 68 Main Street, Portglenone, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 8HS

Gate Lodge, 68 Main Street, Portglenone

A detached one-and-a-half storey, two-bay rendered Victorian gate lodge built around 1870, located on the west side of the former north entrance drive to Portglenone House. The building is L-shaped with a single-storey timber porch set in the re-entrant angle and a lower single-storey return to the west gable. A lean-to kitchen extension is attached to the return, built into the wall of an adjoining walled garden to the west. A second walled garden lies to the south.

The pitched natural slate roof features angled ridge tiles and plastic gutters on timber sheeted eaves with cast-iron downpipes. A cement-rendered chimneystack with concrete coping sits on the party wall, topped with terracotta pots. Timber barge boards with sheeted soffits, moulded brackets and finials frame the gables. The porch has a monopitched fish-scale slate roof with rounded exposed rafter tails.

The walling is roughcast cement-render with flat-rendered quoin-banding over a smooth-rendered plinth course. Windows are generally round-headed with stone sills and rendered moulded surrounds and keystones, containing 1/1 painted timber sliding sash windows with horns. The principal elevation faces east, with the south bay projecting and gabled, and the north bay abutted by the lean-to porch at ground floor. A single square-headed door opening in the re-entrant flank has a chamfered moulded reveal containing a timber-sheeted replacement door. Paired windows light the ground floor of the south bay, with a shorter single window to the gable above a stepped moulded string-course. The north bay porch contains a single window. The porch has turned painted timber framework with stop-end chamfered timber braced panels below.

The south elevation features a central ground-floor window with a stepped string-course continued from the east elevation, and a smooth-rendered blind roundel to the first floor. A mono-pitched slated kitchen extension extends from the south elevation of the return, incorporating a skylight and adjoining door lobby. The west elevation is blank except for a single square-headed 1/1 timber sliding sash to the left of the gable. The single-storey return elevation is blank. The north elevation displays a straight string-course continued from the east elevation and a single window to the first-floor gable.

The lodge is positioned to the west of the entrance to a supermarket carpark, outside recent steel gates, with a tarmacked road surface running hard against the east elevation. A small enclosed garden lies to the south, and a courtyard to the north contains an engaged monopitched shed.

To the north is a historic block and sneck basalt boundary wall with sandstone coping extending west to Bann Bridge and rising at the east end to a square pier with moulded sandstone cornice and plain frieze. A lower gate-screen wall extends towards the gate lodge, terminating in a rebuilt second pier; historic gates are no longer extant. To the east of the driveway are two further gate piers with replacement steel gates and a curved gate-screen wall.

The gate lodge engages the northeast corner of a historic upper walled garden belonging to Portglenone House. Rubble basalt piers exist to the north adjacent to the lodge, infilled with red brick. The walling of the upper walled garden is mostly rubble basalt externally with internal facing of red brick in English garden wall bond over a rubble plinth. Areas of blockwork and concrete rebuilding are present. The east wall contains foundations and a drain of former glasshouses to the north section, while the south section displays differentiated construction of regular rectangular red brick niches infilled flush with rubble basalt. The principal entrance is in the south wall; a smaller gate with raised brick surround leads from the second walled garden.

A lower walled garden adjoins to the southeast corner, with similar wall construction in mostly block and sneck basalt, featuring a chamfered southeast corner and walls rising to either end of the west wall. A large entrance opens at the north end of the east wall, with smaller gates in each other wall—that to the south having a sandstone surround, others brick surrounds. The interior is laid out as a garden with a lowered wooded section to the west.

A summerhouse occupies the south wall, canted to the north elevation. It has a natural slate roof with leaded hips and a cement-rendered chimneystack integral to the boundary wall. The rendered walls feature an overhanging north porch of timber piloti over a sandstone patio. A double-leaf timber door with glazed panels sits above timber aprons with timber architrave. An ornamental pond occupies the centre of the upper terrace, with extant foundations of former glasshouses against the north wall.