North of 1-4 Main Street, Forkhill, Newry, Co Armagh, BT35 9SQ

North of 1-4 Main Street, Forkhill, Newry

A much-altered symmetrical two-storey, three-bay house dating from the early 20th century, set back from the street line with a small garden to front. The building has largely lost its original architectural and historic character.

The house is aligned northwest to southeast on the west side of Church Road. It has a pitched natural slate roof with tiled skews and a brick chimney to each gable. A timber eaves board supports ogee metal rainwater goods with a downpipe to the left. The walls are wet-dashed with stucco stepped quoins. All windows are timber-framed top-hung casements with cement cills, those to the main façade being painted. The principal elevation faces northeast.

All openings to the main façade are set in narrow painted cement-rendered reveals. At ground floor level is a modern panelled mahogany door to the centre with a narrow transom over, flanked by windows to left and right. Three windows are aligned above the ground floor openings. The left gable is abutted by a lower single-storey outbuilding, with an exposed section containing a window to the left. The right gable is abutted by a single-storey lean-to garage with a monopitched corrugated asbestos cement roof. The garage's northeast face has a large pair of tongue-and-groove sheeted doors, flanked by square-section stop-end chamfered gate piers with sweeping pyramidal coping, painted and cement-rendered with whitewashed recessed panels to the centre.

The outbuilding to the left gable is L-plan in form. It has a pitched tarred and felted roof with timber bargeboards to the northeast gable, which projects beyond the front of the house. The southeast gable is raised to form a decorative arched parapet with a datestone marked 1901 at its head. Walls are whitewashed, part wet-dashed and part cement-rendered over rubble stone, with crude painted quoins to the northeast gable. The northwest elevation has a 1x3 fixed pane timber window. The southeast elevation has two boarded window openings with cement cills. The northeast elevation contains a large pair of tongue-and-groove sheeted doors set at the left, flanked by narrow timber pilasters (that to the right is partly missing) supporting a full-length timber fascia, with a large boarded window to the right. The southeast gable has a narrow painted cement-rendered platband at eaves level and a 2/2 fixed pane window in a painted rendered reveal to the left.

Although a building is recorded on this site in the 1835 Ordnance Survey map, nothing appears on the 1907 edition, suggesting the present structure represents an early 20th century rebuild.