Glenlowry House, 84 Chapel Street, Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, BT80 8QD

Glenlowry House is an attached, rendered two-storey terraced house built around 1859, attributed to the architect John Lanyon, and situated on the northern side of Cookstown town centre facing onto Chapel Street. It has group value with the adjacent former Loy House (nos. 80–82), with which it was historically closely connected, and its front elevation displays good proportions enhanced by an iron gate and railings.

The building is roughly rectangular in plan with a pitched two-storey return to the rear and a single-storey lean-to abutting the back of that return. The front (west) elevation onto Chapel Street has square-headed 1-over-1 timber sash windows with painted cut-stone sills. The entrance at ground floor level is a replacement timber door with an overlight, set within a rendered surround featuring a central rendered keystone. The main roof is pitched and slated, with rendered chimneystacks to the main roof finished with profiled stepped capping. Rainwater goods are cast iron. The external walls are rendered with quoins to the edges.

The rear elevation has square-headed replacement timber casement windows and a square-headed timber door at ground floor level. The two-storey return and the single-storey lean-to also have timber casement windows, and the lean-to has a square-headed door. The walls of the return and lean-to are finished in painted dry-dash render.

To the rear there is a concreted yard enclosed to the north by the return of the adjacent Loy House. The yard contains two outbuildings. The first is a pitched, two-storey outbuilding with timber casement windows to its west elevation, an integral elliptical-headed coach arch to the left of the ground floor, square-headed stable doors to the east elevation, a square-headed timber door to the upper level, and a pitched slated roof with cast-iron rainwater goods. The second outbuilding is a single-storey structure with two large square-headed openings facing the yard and a metal lean-to roof.

To the front, the house is set back from Chapel Street behind iron railings on a dwarf wall, with a small garden and a gated path leading to the entrance door.

The site has a complex documentary history. It is shown as developed on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1833–34, though the structure depicted appears considerably narrower than the present building. The valuation of November 1834 records that the building then standing formed part of the large house to the north known as Loy House, and likely constituted the 'offices' (that is, outbuildings) recorded at that time as measuring 110 by 20 by 16½ feet. The present terraced building appears in much of its current form on the valuation plan of 1859. It is likely that the transition from outbuilding to domestic structure took place when Loy House was itself divided into two properties — an event that occurred sometime after 1846, most probably around 1851, when the Stewart of Killymoon Cookstown estate was auctioned off. Whether the earlier outbuilding was completely demolished or whether the three new dwellings that subsequently arose made use of its fabric remains uncertain.

By the second valuation of 1859, the property (recorded as no. 82) was occupied by a Charles Irvine, with Andrew Mulholland — the mill-owner of Ballywalter Park, County Down, who had purchased part of the Cookstown estate at the 1851 sale — as lessor, and a rateable value of £23. Subsequent recorded occupants include Miss Eliza Miller (1862), James Rutherford (1871), Godfrey Lyle (1872), Mary Sinclair (1874, following a period of vacancy), Ida Sinclair (1880), John McKenzie (1887), Philip Foy (1893, again after a period of vacancy), Robert Cunningham (1895), and Thomas McSherry (1898). In 1901 a Jonathan W. Fleming became tenant, followed by Hugh McCullagh in 1903, who remained until some time after 1929. By 1936 an Alexander Foster was in occupation, followed by Olivia Foster in 1952 and Francis McCaffrey in 1955. By 1956 McCaffrey had acquired the lease; by that point the extensive former outbuildings had been subdivided into seven separate properties. McCaffrey was still in residence in 1972.

From around 1868, the valuers applied the name 'Loy Houses' to this property, its two neighbours to the north, and its immediate neighbour to the south. The name 'Loy House' itself appears originally to have referred only to the two northernmost properties, which were once a single dwelling. The extension of the name to this house and its immediate southern neighbour likely reflects the fact that both stand on ground formerly occupied by an outbuilding belonging to the original Loy House, and may partly incorporate its fabric. It is notable, however, that the property two doors to the south (present no. 88), which also stands on part of the same original site, was not included within that designation.