The Coach House

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Rectangular two-storey largely 19th century gable-ended building with vaulted chamber off sunken passage to the rere. It lies a short distance south-west of the main house and facing the yard towards the 18th cebtury outbuildings.

Coach House Building
Front and gable walls of this rectangular building are of coursed rubble always without render, while the back wall is of random rubble construction, which was formerly rendered. The building has a slated roof with plain verges and two low brick chimney-stacks, one in the north gable and the other in the centre of the roof. The north side of the front façade has a door opening, flanked by a window, while the southern part of the elevation has a double door carriage opening, with segmental arch. This is now infilled with a modern door and sash window side lights. This door has shutters at base and sliding sash above, while the old ledged boarded double doors of former coach house remain in place. The south gable wall at ground floor has no openings, but at first floor level there is a large, centrally placed, fixed sash window (nine panes) - formerly this had a wooden shutter opening and was where the grain and hay was hauled up to the loft space. A small window flanks this opening, containing a timber top-hung casement. At the rere of the building there are three windows and the ground falls away downslope to a sunken passage running into the basement of the coach houise, which is entered via a door. The basement only occupies the north half of the building; there is no basement under the south half of the building.
Storage House and Sunken Passage
Long narrow passage, c.20m long and c.2m wide, has been cut into the hillside to rere of the building. It leads directly to the door of basement beneath building. Sides of passage are revetted by dry-stone walling, now covered in ivy. The ground above supports trees and ground ivy. On the south side of this passage, a few metres from the basement door, there is a cambered door opening leading immediately into a long rectangular chamber. This is vaulted with a segmental arch and rendered. Unfortunately, the chamber is filled with rubblish and is peesently inaccessible, so an inspection of its floor was not possible. The chamber, about 8m long and 4m wide, was clearly built for storage, possibly as an ice house. It could be described as a miniature version of the rectangular commercial ice houses found on the north coast. The door is missing. To the west of the sunken passage, on the opposite side of the lane, lie remains of a circular pond, surrounded by trees. It has been claimed that this was created to collect ice in winter.

Historical information

Specific:
A building on this site is shown on the 1832 and 1850s Ordnance Survey map editions. This evidently comprised the basement and the first floor of the present building, which was both enlarged and remodelled c.1870. The remodelling includes the coach house and the whole of the building's upper floor, with its collar beam and purlin roof. One must presume that the accommodation in this building was designed c.1870 for the coachman. The storage chamber to the rere, with its associated sunken passage, was probably built as part of the original building in the 18th or early 19th century. It has been claimed that the chamber was built as an ice house by local fishermen, but no doucmentary evidence has yet been found to support this case.

General:
Prehen means ‘place of the crows’ and during the 17th century the banks of the River Foyle in this vicinity were still thickly wooded. The townland of Prehen, part of civil parish of Clondermot, and barony of Tirkeeran, was acquired as part of Goldsmith’s Proportion in 1614. Thomas Raven’s map of the Proportion, made in 1619, shows the townland clearly with a house located close to the water, south-west of the present mansion. This building, evidently a single storey gable-ended dwelling, occupied by one William Taylor, was undoubtably destroyed in the 1640 Rebellion. The property was acquired in 1664 by Alderman Alexander Tomkins and his wife Margaret, daughter of Alderman Thomas Moncreiffe. Tomkins was Mayor of the city at the time of the siege of Londonderry in 1689 and there is a memorial dedicated to ‘Tomkins of Prehen’ in Derry Cathedral erected in 1678. His house at Prehen, which was probably built in the 1660s, must have stood on the site of the present building. However, it may not have been a large affair, for although Tomkins is described as ‘of Prehen’, his main house was probably in the city itself. Whatever house stood here, it must have been badly damaged in 1690 when the more irregular troops of James II gutted houses in the vicinity of the city. Alderman Tomkins’s son George served as MP for the city from 1715-39 and apparently had a residence in Mobuy, Co. Londonderry.
On stylistic and architectural grounds we can deduce that the present house was built in the 1740s. It is therefore most likely to have been built by Colonel Andrew Knox, who in 1738 married Honaria, daughter and heiress of Andrew Tomkins of Prehen. Andrew Knox was descended from a Scot, the Rev, Andrew Knox, who was consecrated Bishop of Raphoe in 1610, and was granted the monastic lands of Rathmullan in 1614. On the death of his father George in 1741, Col. Knox inherited the family houses at both Rathmullan and Munnymore, Co. Donegal. It is likely that the income from this inheritance provided the financial stimulus to built the present house at Prehen.
While there is no documentary proof to support it, on stylistic grounds it seems very likely that he engaged the Londonderry architect Michael Priestly. There are similarities with Lifford Court House (1745), notably in the use of the parapet and Gibbs door surround and deep pediment. Another Priestly house, Porthall in Donegal, built for John Vaughan of Buncrana, also shares a number of features with Prehen.
The Lifford Court house was to witness the trial of ‘half hung’ John MacNaghten of Benvarden in December 1761. He was found guilty of murdering Mary Ann, the only daughter of Col. Andrew Knox and later executed. The event, which began with his perusal of the hand of Mary Ann Knox in 1759, followed by her attempted kidnapping and murder in a coach near Strabane, was a major and tragic event in the history of Prehen during the time of Col. Andrew Knox.
Col. Knox was to serve as MP for Donegal for 27 years. He was a religious man and made friends with the dissenter John Wesley (1703-91), who stayed at Prehen in the 1760s. In 1760 George Knox, son and heir of Col. Andrew Knox, and brother of the murdered Mary Ann, married Jane, daughter of Thomas Mahon of Strokestown House, Co. Roscommon. On the death of his father he succeeded to the Rathmullan and Moneymore properties in 1774 and later on the death of his mother in the 1790s he also inherited Prehen. He lived until 1840 and was responsible for creating the parkland around the house in the 1790s (now much reduced) and for building a gate lodge c.1820. The adjacent road alongside the Foyle here was laid down in 1795. The house and its parkland is depicted in a Brocas print c.1800 from the city of Londonderry.
Prehen was inherited by George Knox’s eldest son Andrew, who was Lieutenant in the Donegal Militia and for many years MP for County Donegal. He married Mary, daughter of Dominick McCausland of Drenagh and was in turn succeeded prematurely in 1848 at Prehen by his son George, then a minor (1832-1910). George had a successful military career, being Lieutenant-Colonel in the Derry Artillery and High Sheriff of County Donegal in 1862. He liked to travel around the world, collecting curios abroad, including a wife he found in Switzerland, Rose Virginie Grimm of Neuchatel. He died in November 1910, leaving no sons, and thus the male line of Knoxes at Prehen came to an end.
George Know had two daughters, one of whom married Ludwig Von Scheffler, Doctor of Philosophy at Weimar near Hamburg. They in turn had a son George, born 1884, who became a Page to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and later Governor of the Royal pages at the Emperor’s Court in Berlin, where he was honoured with the title ‘Baron’. He inherited Prehen from his grandfather aged only 26, but a condition of the inheritance was that he add the name Know to his own for the term of his natural life, and that he become a British Citizen within two years of the testator’s death. The inheritance was contested in court, which Baron Scheffler won, and he subsequently settled in Prehen. Unfortunately, the Great War broke out in 1914 and Baron George Otto Louis Von Scheffler-Knox found himself declared an enemy alien and the house and lands of Prehen were requisitioned and placed on the open market under the Enemy Property Act (conveyance signed by Stephen Tallents, Custodian under the Enemy property Act). The Baron himself died in 1966.
During the early 20th century the house was subdivided into flats and the parkland suffered with trees being felled. Eventually, the house was acquired by in 1971 by Julia Peck, granddaughter of Winifred Knox, authoress of 25 historical novels and histories. The house, then in a poor state of repair, was restored by her and her parents Julian and Carola Peck, who moved here from Rathbeale hall, near Swords in 1974. Mr Peck died in 2001.

References:
Mss Map dated 1828 or 1829 by JL. Townlands of Currody, Bolies, Brickilns, Prehen.
Ordnance Survey Map Sheet 20 (1832)
Ordnance Survey Map Sheet 20 (1856)
PRONI D/2807
The Irish Society (1822) A Concise View of the Irish Society, p93.
PRONI MIC/26 Templemore Church of Ireland Register
The Registers of Derry Cathedral, Parish of Templemore, 1642-1703 (Parish Register Society of Dublin, 1910), p367.
Burke’s Landed Gentry (1846), p1404.
Pue’s Occurrences, 11th September 1739.
View of Foyle toward Prehen by Henry Brocas
Ordnance Survey Memoirs (1835)
Penelope FitzGerald (1977) The Knox Brothers. Macmillan, London
Bence-Jones, M (1978) Irish Country Houses, p235. Burkes, London
Rowan, Alistair 91979). North West Ulster, p405-6. Penguin, Harmondsworth
Dean, J. A. K (1994) The Gate Lodges of Ulster, p119. UAHS, Belfast
Mss Notes compiled by Colin Peck.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
J. Setting
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

X. Local Interest

Evaluation

Two period building, the final neat remodelling c.1870 converting this into coach house with associated accommodation, possibly for the coach man. The storage chamber and sunken passage to rere are of particular interest, and may well be a small ice house, similar in form to the much larger commercial ice houses of the north coast. If this can be proved to be an ice houise, its form would be unique for a country house, where ice houses normally take a circular egg-shape form.

General comments

The storage chamber, evidently an ice house, would belong to the same type of commercial ice house buildt along the north coast of County Londonderry and Antrim. It is almost unique, if not unique, for such an ice to appear in a country house context in Ireland.