92 Battery Road, Ardboe, Cookstown, BT80 0HW

92 Battery Road, Ardboe, Cookstown

This is a detached two-storey vernacular-style farm building built around 1838, located on the north side of Battery Road within the Drumenny (Conyngham) townland near Cookstown, to the east of the shores of Lough Neagh. It is a rare survival of a small two-storey road-fronting vernacular farm building, with robust proportions and unusual details that suggest it was more than a utilitarian structure.

The building is rectangular in plan with external walls of whitewashed roughcast render and a pitched roof covered with natural slate. A plain rendered chimney rises to the apex of the south gable, while the north gable is topped with a rendered bellcote containing a round-headed opening; the bell has been removed. Cast-iron rainwater goods are fitted throughout.

The front south elevation is gable-ended and faces onto the road. It features a round-headed window to the first floor with a roundel and datestone above. The window is a 1/1 timber sliding sash frame set on a painted cut-stone sill. The roundel is open to the interior with no glazing, and is surmounted by a datestone inscribed 'E.D. 1838'. The west side elevation contains segmental-headed windows to both ground and first floor, both 1/1 sliding sash frames on painted cut-stone sills. The north rear elevation is gable-ended with a single-storey outhouse addition obscuring the ground floor level; a square-headed opening is visible at first floor, and the bellcote rises to the gable apex. The east side elevation has two segmental-headed doors to the ground floor with painted timber sheeted doors, and a further smaller segmental-headed opening at first floor level, possibly a former access door.

The building is accessed via a gateway immediately to the southwest with an inward-curving entrance flanked by two rounded pillars surmounted by smooth conical cappings and a wrought-iron gate opening onto a grazed area now used as a garden for the adjoining house. Modern rendered pillars to the southeast lead to a tarmac entrance drive.

The datestone indicates construction in 1838, though the identity of the builder 'E.D.' remains unknown. The accompanying house it was built to serve appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1833–34 and is marked 'Ivy Vale' on the map of 1853. The 1859 valuation records Catherine Costello as the occupant of Ivy Vale, though no building details are provided. The property passed to the Rodgers family in 1875, remaining with them until 1951 when Gerald Tennyson is noted as the householder. Tradition suggests the building may have served as a soup kitchen during the Great Famine of 1846–53, though no documentary evidence supports this claim.