Laurel Hill, 10 Tyrone's Ditches Road, Cullentragh, Poyntzpass, Newry, Co Armagh, BT35 6SB

Laurel Hill is a plain two-storey farmhouse with a two-storey rear return, which assumed its present form around 1849. It sits on the west side of Tyrone's Ditches Road, roughly three miles south-west of Poyntzpass, and is accompanied by a large collection of largely contemporary two-storey and single-storey outbuildings. It is a good and reasonably intact example of a relatively prosperous mid-19th-century farmhouse.

EXTERIOR

The symmetrical front façade faces roughly north-east. At the centre of the ground floor is the main entrance, consisting of a panelled and glazed door beneath a rectangular fanlight with brick-pattern tracery. A large millstone has been embedded in the ground directly in front of the door, serving as a threshold. To either side of the entrance is a flat-arch sash window with Georgian panes (six over six) and no horns. The first floor has three similar but noticeably smaller windows. The front façade is finished in what appears to be an early-to-mid 20th-century dry dash of small, rounded, black and white pebbles — possibly dating from around 1930 — with smooth rendered in-and-out quoins and a first-floor sill course. Decorative geometric surrounds to the openings have been created in the dry dash using larger black and white pebbles and smooth narrow render bands. Stone sills throughout. Both the north and south gables are plain rendered and have no openings.

Projecting from the centre of the rear elevation is a large two-storey gabled return. To the rear of the main section of the house, immediately to the left of the return, is a first-floor window with a steel frame dating from the 1930s or later. This window sits very close to the intersection with the return, and marks in the surrounding render suggest it was once slightly deeper. To the right of the return, placed slightly further away from it, is a similar first-floor window. On the north face of the return there are two ground-floor windows: the one to the right matches the ground-floor front windows, while the one to the left is considerably smaller and has a plain sash frame. At first-floor level there are two windows matching the ground-floor right window. The west-facing gable of the return is blank, though at its southernmost edge it is abutted by the end wall of a large two-storey outbuilding (see below). On the south face of the return there is a full-length single-storey lean-to, which has a small two-pane window to the left, then a timber-sheeted door, then a small casement window. At first-floor level in the return proper there are two narrow windows with recent frames incorporating hopper openers. At its west end the lean-to abuts the two-storey outbuilding. Many of the return windows are covered with security grilles.

The whole of the rear elevation is finished in a mixture of plain cement render and rough harling, the latter applied to the south side of the return. All sections of the roof are slated, with rendered parapets to the main roof and to that of the return. There are three rendered chimneystacks, one to each gable, fitted with octagonal pots. Rainwater goods are a mixture of cast iron and PVC.

SETTING AND OUTBUILDINGS

To the front of the house is a small garden enclosed by a rough-cast rendered wall with gabled coping. The wall includes a pedestrian gateway with round piers topped by shallow pitched cone caps, and a simple decorative wrought-iron gate.

Immediately to the south of the house is a large L-shaped two-storey gabled outbuilding, largely harled and whitewashed with a slated roof. The section set to the west is slightly lower in height than the section to the south, which itself has differing roof heights. The inward, yard-facing faces of both sections retain what appear to be original openings: timber-sheeted pedestrian and stable doors along with a few broader vehicle doorways at ground level, and a mixture of timber-sheeted loft doors and windows of various sizes at first-floor level. The south face of the southern section has similar ground- and first-floor openings. At the south-west corner of the L-shaped outbuilding there may once have been a horse-walk; the surveyors did not visit this area directly, but a roughly circular field pattern is recorded on various Ordnance Survey maps.

To the south of the L-shaped outbuilding is a larger yard, bordered by a large J-shaped complex of single-storey outbuildings that abut one another. These are finished in broadly the same manner as the two-storey outbuilding and have similar openings, though the roof of the eastern section, which runs parallel to the roadside, is in corrugated iron.

HISTORY

The present owner acquired Laurel Hill following the death of Miss Mary Savage in 2001. The Savage family had held the house since around 1849, the year in which Mary Savage's grandfather, the Reverend Alexander Savage, became minister of the nearby Ballenan (or Ballenon) Reformed Presbyterian Church. According to an account written by Mary Savage and her sister Sarah sometime in the mid-20th century and held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), Alexander Savage built the present house around the 1850s on the site of an earlier dwelling, retaining a portion of that original structure as the return. The current owner goes further, stating that the Misses Savage told him that this older portion — which he believes to be partly mud-walled — dated from around 1710 to 1720, though this is difficult to confirm in the historical record.

It is clear that the present house, return, and outbuildings were in place by at least 1855, as they appear on a pictorial map of that year drawn up by a John Martin. The property is also shown on the revised Ordnance Survey map of 1859 and recorded in the valuation of 1863, which graded it 'B+', indicating a well-maintained building of perhaps twenty or more years' age at that time.

The date of the building's construction remains uncertain. The Savage family account regards the main front portion as the work of Alexander Savage following his arrival in 1849, a date consistent with the John Martin map and supported by mid-19th-century detailing surviving in the hallway and at least one of the fireplaces. However, this appears to be contradicted by the age implied by the 1863 valuation grade, and also by the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1835, which shows a building matching the plan of the front portion but with no sign of anything on the site of the return. This might suggest that it is the front section, not the return, that is the older element — though the front portion shown in 1835 was not recorded in the near-contemporary first valuation, indicating it was a modest structure, possibly single-storey, and the current front portion may therefore have been raised or substantially rebuilt.

There is one further piece of evidence. In the Savage sisters' account of their grandfather, they state that the older building — which they believed to be the return — had previously housed another minister, a Reverend King, and was therefore effectively a manse. As such it would more likely have been a fairly substantial dwelling, possibly two-storey. It is possible that the present house was built by King sometime after the date of the first valuation in 1836 but before Savage arrived in 1849, and that Savage merely refurbished the interior. The precise sequence of construction at Laurel Hill therefore remains unresolved.