32 Lower Grange Road, Cookstown, BT80 8RZ

32 Lower Grange Road is a well-proportioned nineteenth-century single-storey vernacular house of early nineteenth-century date, retaining its rural setting. It exemplifies the characteristic elongated linear plan form with a hearth lobby arrangement that is increasingly rare in the area. The building's character has been degraded by the loss of a chimney and the replacement of the original roof covering with fibre cement slates.

The house is rendered single-storey with a doubled pitched roof, long and rectangular in plan. A single-storey pitched return projects to the rear north side. A single-storey pitched shed with a metal roof adjoins the west gable, and a further single-storey metal shed stands to the west of this. The front south elevation faces onto Grange Road and features a central square-headed doorway with two windows on each side, fitted with 1/1 timber sliding sash frames. The side east elevation is gable-ended with no openings. The rear north elevation has two small square-headed timber windows. The external walls are roughcast rendered. The roof is pitched with fibre cement slate and has slightly overhanging eaves with exposed rafter ends. Rendered chimneys stand at each gable end, though the central chimney has collapsed.

The single-storey rear return has a square-headed window opening to the west and a pitched slated roof. The random rubble shed to the rear has a corrugated metal pitched roof. The corrugated metal shed is painted. Neither shed has visible openings. The cottage sits directly onto Grange Road with a large sloping field behind.

The building appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1833-34 but was not recorded in the first valuation of 1834 as it lay below rateable value. By the 1858 valuation, Thomas McCord occupied the property as tenant, with Charles K. Colhoun as immediate lessor, at a rateable value of £1-10-0. The McCord family retained the property until sometime between 1936 and 1956, when it passed to Robert Matthews, who remained in residence in 1972. The small north-side projection appears to be an addition. The early twentieth-century character of the roof—its overhang, exposed rafter ends, and asbestos tiles—suggests major changes may have occurred around that period, though valuations characteristically make no mention of alterations, consistent with vernacular buildings in the Cookstown area.