258 Newry Road, Mourne Park Estate, Kilkeel, Newry, Co Down, BT34 3SE

This is a small, attractive house of interest due to its association with the Mourne Park Estate. The building dates from between 1820 and 1839 and is located in the southwest corner of the demesne, within the townland of Ballyrogan or Mourne Park. It may originally have comprised three separate houses, but these bays are now internally connected.

The house is a single-storey, L-shaped building. It has a hipped roof covered in natural slate with clay ridges, and four brick chimneys—one on each party wall and one on the end gable of the return. Half-round metal rainwater gutters run along the edges. The exterior walls are harled and whitewashed with a projecting eaves course. The principal façade faces south and features a timber door towards the left side of the third bay, set within a shallow, projecting porch with a natural slate monopitch roof. The first bay has a single window, and the second has two. The third bay includes a single window to the right of the door, and the fourth bay also features a single window. All windows are paired two-pane casements with painted granite sills.

The left gable is adjoined by a small lean-to porch with a natural slate roof and walls matching the main building. The exposed section of the main gable has a fixed 1/1 window. The lean-to’s west-facing wall has a similar fixed window, a timber door on its right side, and a blank left side. The right gable is part of an integral return and has no openings. The rear elevation includes the advanced gable of the hipped return, with a window mirroring that of the front façade on its left side, and a four-panel painted timber door on its right. A lean-to abuts the rear of the second bay from the left, with a monopitched corrugated asbestos roof (including a skylight), a pair of fixed-pane windows, and a door on its right side. The third bay from the left has an infilled window opening, while the fourth bay, at the right, contains a small modern window in an original opening.

The building sits within long front gardens and has an enclosed yard to the rear. It was shown on the 1834 Ordnance Survey map along what was then the Tullyframe Road and was identified as a ‘school house’ on the 1859 map. Between 1859 and 1901, the estate boundary was realigned, incorporating the building within the grounds of the demesne. It is possibly a late 19th-century rebuild on earlier foundations. While the building retains some architectural charm, a rear addition and subsequent reconfiguration of the interior layout detract from its original character.