Potato store, 11 Castleward Road, Strangford, Co Down

This is a free-standing, single-storey brick-built former potato store dating from the 1930s, situated on the south side of Castleward Road on the south-western outskirts of Strangford, in a good, open rural setting. The building measures approximately 19 metres by 9 metres.

The store is constructed entirely in brick. To the front north gable there is a large flat-arched vehicle entrance fitted with timber sliding doors, and a similar, marginally smaller entrance opens to the east elevation. A small lean-to offshoot abuts the north-east corner; this lean-to has a tall chimneystack and is understood to have contained a boiler, and its roof is slated. A small boarded-up window opening is visible on the north face of the lean-to.

The interior is a single, bare-walled space with an earthen floor. The curved roof is covered in felt with a square skylight positioned roughly to the centre. The roof structure is made up of five 'McTear' Belfast trusses — a form of wooden bowstring girder in which diagonal bracings connect the upper curved bow and the lower straight cord, meeting at right angles at regularly spaced purlins along the bow.

The Belfast truss takes its name from Belfast, where it was developed and widely manufactured during the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century. The earliest known reference to this roof form appears in The Dublin Builder of 1866, in an advertisement placed by the Belfast felt-making firm McTear & Co. The system became widely used for industrial and agricultural buildings because it allowed large, clear floor spans to be achieved using relatively small-section timbers of low grade, combined with a felt-covered timber deck — a roofing method that was lighter and cheaper than traditional slated pitches. The truss form remained in common use for moderate spans throughout the 1930s, when garages, farm outbuildings, builders' yards, and railway buildings were among the structures most frequently roofed in this way. McTear & Co are recorded as having ceased trading around 1908, making the use of their named trusses in this building a notable survival.

The building is described as having been constructed as a potato store in the 1930s, based on information supplied by the owner in January 2003. It survives in its original, unaltered condition — retaining its bare walls, earthen floor, timber sliding doors, and intact roof structure — making it an increasingly rare intact example of a modest Belfast truss-roofed agricultural building in an unaltered rural setting. The building was surveyed as part of the Belfast Roof Truss survey.