Cottages at Ballydugan
Some years ago, Hearth restored a number of derelict dwellings
in the Glens of Antrim for the NI Tourist Board's Rural
Cottage Holidays scheme. Although they are no longer developing
their own projects, RCH has fostered a number of private projects
where farmers are restoring their own property as holiday cottages.
Hearth has just started on site with one such group at Ballydugan
near Downpatrick.
The unusual quality of the cottages at Ballydugan is
the way they form a "clachan" or cluster of dwellings
on either side of a narrow road. On one side is "Huddleston's",
an ochre-painted stone cottage, with its satellite barns in a
straggling row; on the other side of the road is Ivy Cottage,
a more formal building with tall brick chimneys, again with subsidiary
outbuildings.
Both houses were in poor condition, having been empty for many
years,
but perhaps because of that neglect they have retained a variety
of interesting interior features, like wooden shutters with beautiful
blacksmith's hinges to tiny windows, and stone barn floors with
drainage channels
and cobbles.
As far as possible these are being retained and adapted in the
course of the conversion into holiday cottages.
Work on an old building always uncovers unexpected problems -
not that problems are unexpected, but you can't always forecast
what they are going to be. In the case of the Huddleston's outbuildings,
these have included trees
rooted in the stonework which required surgical removal
and invisible mending, and
rubble stone walls which proved to be internally very unstable
and had to be tied together.
In this case some of the older
walls had been built not in cement as modern walls are, or even
in lime as most older ones are, but in clay or till.
Where the walls are structurally sound
they have been left, and the new gutters and French drains should
keep the walls reasonably dry, but in some areas the walls were
so far out of plumb that they had to be rebuilt.
Our builder, Noel Killen, is not a man to be put off
by wet weather or any of the excuses normally made for delays.
On the other hand he has found progress in certain areas to be
impossible because of nesting birds. A pied wagtail nested in
a pile of stones he was using alongside Huddleston's earlier in
the year, and in July a swallow, no doubt returning to the house
of its birth, insisted on building its nest
in the new ceiling of Ivy
Cottage. Undeterred by all the activity in the vicinity the swallow
continued to raise its chicks, but it has delayed the closing
in of the ceiling!
Once the birds had flown, the ceilings were finally
put up, and the plasterer made a "horse" 
with which to run the cornice
of the living room in the traditional manner
. Most cornices nowadays are
run in fibrous plaster, which the Victorians invented to run elaborately
sculpted cornices, but in Georgian houses like this the profile
of the moulding was run into wet plaster on site.
Ivy Cottage, which was quite a grand small house in
its day, is now finished, with its internal walls painted traditional
maroons, sage greens and straw colours, and its massive brick
kitchen chimney breast restored. Huddleston's, the house across
the road from it, is also now finished and receiving visitors,
but work on the other two houses being formed from its old outbuildings,
is still going on.
but perhaps because of that neglect they have retained a variety
of interesting interior features, like wooden shutters with beautiful
blacksmith's hinges to tiny windows, and stone barn floors with
drainage channels
and cobbles.
As far as possible these are being retained and adapted in the
course of the conversion into holiday cottages.
rooted in the stonework which required surgical removal
and invisible mending, and
rubble stone walls which proved to be internally very unstable
and had to be tied together.
In this case some of the older
walls had been built not in cement as modern walls are, or even
in lime as most older ones are, but in clay or till.
Where the walls are structurally sound
they have been left, and the new gutters and French drains should
keep the walls reasonably dry, but in some areas the walls were
so far out of plumb that they had to be rebuilt.
in the new ceiling of Ivy
Cottage. Undeterred by all the activity in the vicinity the swallow
continued to raise its chicks, but it has delayed the closing
in of the ceiling!
with which to run the cornice
of the living room in the traditional manner
. Most cornices nowadays are
run in fibrous plaster, which the Victorians invented to run elaborately
sculpted cornices, but in Georgian houses like this the profile
of the moulding was run into wet plaster on site.