Building at Burrell's Folly

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

A two-storey, four-bay stone house, now vacant and in use as a farm building, built c.1830 as offices for a large house and located to the south of Drumquin Village. The house is rectangular on plan, facing north, extended to west by lower two-storey extension.

The roof is pitched natural slate with stone corbelled eaves. There are dressed stone chimneystacks to gables. Rainwater goods are gone but drive-in metal brackets remain. Walling is lime rendered over random rubble stone construction with dressed stone quoins evident beneath. Windows are missing, some boarded over, with remains of timber framed windows; cills are stone. Doors are gone, some blocked with wooden pallets.

Principal (yard-facing) elevation faces north and is asymmetrical. Some openings have been enlarged. Ground floor consists of four bays, accessed by a variety of openings, some enlarged and supported on steel or timber lintels. To extreme right end is an external flight of stone steps supported on a cast-iron column leading to a loading door.

Left gable is abutted by the remains of a single storey byre of rubble stone construction, now roofless and overgrown.

Rear (road-facing) elevation consists of four equally spaced window openings to each floor, the majority infilled with rubble stone.

Right gable is abutted by the lower outbuilding, comprising (to yard-facing elevation) two door openings and a window opening to ground floor and two window openings to first floor. The road-facing south elevation is of coursed random rubble and has two infilled window openings with stone cills. This is further extended to right by the remains of a roofless rubble stone structure with fireplace and chimneybreast to the south wall. Wall heads are heavily covered with ivy growth.

Setting

The house bounds the south side of a triangular site and is set at a skew alongside a small stream flowing immediately to south, which is bridged by a country lane. The internal yard is accessed at east end by a pair of wrought-iron gates. The west side of the yard is bounded by a high coursed random rubble stone wall with square-headed opening formed with heavy fieldstone lintel leading to an overgrown paddock, possibly a former garden. Directly to north is a recent housing development (partially occupying the site of the main house).

Roof Natural slate
Walling stone/lime render
Windows Missing
RWG Missing

Historical information

The site is captioned ‘Burn’s Folly’ on the first edition OS Map of 1833. The building in question first appears on the second edition OS Map of 1854 (where the site is captioned ‘Burrel’s Folly’) replacing an earlier building to the south of the plot and set perpendicular to the main house.

Listing query information provided by the NIEA states that

Griffith’s Valuation records Edward Sproule Esq as the leaseholder, and lists the site as the property of Henry Echlin, Jas A and Frederick Boyle Esqs. The buildings are valued at £13 15s 0d. The Annual Revisions revise the value to £15 0s 0d. This remains the value until 1908 when it is revised to £2.

Rowan comments; “This is just a ruined farmhouse of 1779 with extensive outbuildings once the home of a family called Sproule.” (p.254)

The main house no longer stands, and the former offices are all that remain. The internal arrangement of rooms and fireplaces suggests that the building combined some form of workers’ dwellings with storage and agricultural use.

Primary Sources:

1. PRONI OS/6/6/33/1-2 – Ordnance Survey Maps (1833, 1854)
2. PRONI VAL/1/A/6/33 – Townland Valuation Map
3. PRONI VAL/1/B/634 – Townland Valuation Records (1828-40)
4. PRONI VAL/2/A/6/33B – Griffith’s Valuation Map
5. PRONI VAL/2/B/6/36 – Griffith’s Valuation (1856-64)
6. PRONI VAL/12/B/41/18/A-F – Annual Revision Records (1860-1923)

Secondary Sources:

1. Rowan, A ‘The Buildings of Ireland: North West Ulster’, Penguin Books, 1979

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

A two-storey, four-bay stone house, now vacant and in use as a farm building, built c.1830 as offices for a large house. A solid two-storey four-bay early nineteenth-century building, formerly an attendant building to Burrell’s Folly (HB11/04/015A) and accommodating workers’ accommodation and farm stores. While it is of some local interest, has lost much of its historic fabric and of a relatively common type and does not meet the statutory and policy tests as a building of special architectural or historic interest.