East Gate Lodge, St Joseph's Convent, Castlecaulfield Road, Donaghmore, Dungannon, BT70 3HF

East Gate Lodge, St Joseph's Convent, Donaghmore

This is a single-storey gate lodge with a basement level, built in the Classical style around 1827. It formerly served Donaghmore House, now St Joseph's Convent School, but is currently derelict. Gate lodges of any era are still relatively common in the Irish countryside, but early 19th century examples are comparatively scarce, and the presence of a basement level is a rare distinction in a lodge of any period. The building is set on the west side of Castlecaulfield Road on the southern outskirts of Donaghmore. Following a road realignment in the late 19th century, the lodge became fully incorporated within the grounds of the main house, but prior to that realignment it was originally positioned on the opposite side of the road from the drive it served.

The building is rectangular in plan and treated in a simple, austere Classical manner throughout. The walls are finished in ashlar stone. The roof was originally hipped but has collapsed, as has the once-centrally located chimneystack. The front elevation, which faces broadly north-north-west, is symmetrical. It has a central flat-arched doorway with a panelled door, flanked on each side by squarish flat-arched window openings. These windows have lost their original frames but retain their cut stone sills. Above all three openings runs a largely undecorated entablature, supported by four rather squat three-quarter attached columns with Ionic capitals. The outer columns are square in section, while the inner two are round. The east and west elevations each contain a single window opening treated in the same manner as those on the front. The rear elevation was not accessible for inspection due to thick vegetation, but it is believed to contain a doorway giving access to the lower basement level.

Extending east and west from the lodge are quadrant screen walls carrying decorative iron railings — possibly later additions — set on a low cut stone wall. These terminate in v-joint rusticated pillars with concave pyramidal caps, and octagonal stone buffers are positioned beside each pillar.

Historical background

A building on the same footprint as the present lodge is shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1834, and is specifically marked as a gate lodge on the revised map of 1857. The first valuation of February 1835 records it as a relatively newly built, slate-roofed porter's lodge occupied by a Robert Graham and measuring 24 feet by 14 feet by 17 feet. At that date the lodge served an old, large, two-storey thatched house to the north-west, on the opposite side of the road, occupied by a local brewer, Alexander MacKenzie. An estate map of 1824 shows this house together with the quadrant walls at the head of the drive, but without the lodge, suggesting it had not yet been built. The lodge is believed to appear on a map of 1830, though the existence of this map has not been confirmed and it is not held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. On the basis of the available evidence it is tentatively dated to the later 1820s. The identity of the architect is not known.

Alexander MacKenzie died sometime between late 1844 and 1846, and the entire property passed to Jane Lyle, probably his daughter Jane MacKenzie Lyle. The present classical mansion on the site — Donaghmore House — is thought to have been built just before this transfer, around 1842 to 1843. The name Donaghmore House begins to appear in leases involving MacKenzie from that date, and a sundial still on site is dated 1842. The house was certainly standing by 1857, when it appears on the revised Ordnance Survey map. The gate lodge, as is common with estate-related dwellings, is not recorded in detail in the mid- to later 19th century valuations. It reappears in the record in 1891, when Charles Fitzsimmons is listed as tenant, followed by Robert Maglone (or McGlone) in 1895, John Comac in 1916, and William Smith in 1921.

Donaghmore House passed to Alexander MacKenzie Lyle — believed to be Jane's son — around 1860, and the Lyle family remained there until around 1913. After lying vacant for a few years, the house was sold in 1917 to John Laverty, a local horse-dealer, said to have purchased it on the strength of a large order of horses from the Greek government. That deal apparently fell through, and Laverty sold the property in 1920 to the local Roman Catholic Canon, Joseph O'Neill, from whom it was purchased by the Order of the Sisters of the Cross, who opened it as a boarding school in 1922. The gate lodge continued to be occupied after this date and is recorded as the home of a James Johnston in 1950. It was probably abandoned around 1965 following the construction of a new lodge — the neighbouring bungalow.

The lodge is noted for its stylistic quality, its well-proportioned Classical ornamentation, and its rarity as an early 19th century example of its type. Considered together with Donaghmore House, the two buildings form a pair of local importance, though the setting of both has been somewhat compromised in recent years. The listing covers the gate lodge and screen walls.

Notes on Donaghmore House

Donaghmore House, now St Joseph's Convent School, stands on or close to the site of a rectory said to have been built in 1683 by the Reverend George Walker, later Governor of Derry during the Siege. Datestones of 1693 and 1694 were uncovered during work carried out in 1980. This rectory is believed to have been damaged during the Williamite Wars and replaced with a new house around 1707 by George's son, John Walker. This second dwelling, depicted in a naive style on an estate map of 1715 and described by architectural historian Alistair Rowan as a tiny four-bay, two-storey ashlar house, survives in place today behind the later house. At some point in the later 18th century, possibly after Alexander MacKenzie acquired the property around 1796, the old Walker house was enlarged with the addition of a new front block: the two-storey thatched house noted above. This is shown on the 1824 estate map as a relatively large gabled building with a seemingly asymmetric five-opening-wide frontage and is recorded in the 1835 valuation as measuring 58 feet by 27 feet by 14½ feet. Local historian Ryan Hughes has suggested that this block was incorporated within the present classical mansion, though this is considered unlikely. The authorship of the classical mansion is unknown, but stylistic similarities with the gate lodge suggest both may have been designed by the same hand.

The quadrangle of school buildings to the rear of the house was commenced in the 1920s. The largely brick three-storey wings — which contained the chapel, dining room and dormitories — were completed in 1935 to designs by W. J. Gregory. The other buildings to the north appear to date from around 1965.