Boundary Post near 1 Hawthorn Villas Barley Lane Newry Co Down BT34 2AD

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Granite boundary stone, believed to date from 1871-72, located at the N end of Barley Lane (at the junction with Courtney Hill), about 0.9km SE of Newry town centre.

The stone is now partially embedded in concrete and acts as a defacto bollard. Above ground it is around 0.3m in height, oblong in section, and has a dressed finish in front with rock-faced sides and an arched top (which may originally have been more angular.) On the front face are the incised letters 'M B', which presumably stand for 'Municipal Boundary'.

Historical information

Under the provisions of the Lighting of Towns (Ireland) Act in 1828, local government was established in Newry in the form of the Commissioners of Police. In the years immediately following, a municipal boundary was eventually agreed upon, with the ‘area of the town’ later stated to have been fixed (and possibly modified?) ‘by special act of 1865.’ None of these boundaries, however, appears to have possessed ‘official’ status until 1871, when following the passing of the Newry Improvement and Water Act, the Town Commissioners were formally incorporated as a municipal body and the limits of the settlement laid down, seemingly along those of 1865. This same boundary was later readopted by the Newry Urban District Council, the body which succeeded the Commissioners after the local government reform of 1898.

Whether Newry possessed a series of boundary markers prior to the 1871 Act is uncertain, but the lack of mention of any in the town’s newspapers before this, (in an era when such objects were often referenced as location points in relation reports of incidents, property sale notices etc.), suggests it might not have. So too does the fact that in October 1871, the Commissioners appointed Mr. Robert Beard ‘for the furnishing of eighteen cut granite stones for borough boundary marks, according to specifications’. It may also be instructive that it is only from mid-1872 that not infrequent allusions to ‘boundary stones’ begin to feature in the local press.

It is likely that the most of the in-situ granite markers we see today belong to those supplied by Mr. Beard (probably Robert Baird, a stone cutter recorded as having a yard in Mary Street in the 1880s), and therefore date from c.1871-72. It is possible, however, that some are later or that more than the 18 mentioned in 1871 were actually commissioned, for at least 20 stones are marked along the Urban District Council boundary on the various editions of the OS maps for this area between 1903 and 1939. The fact that all are of the same basic design makes it difficult to determine if indeed there is indeed any variation in date, and we can really only rely on map evidence. That said, it is possible that there are some inconsistencies in the maps themselves, and that certain editions omitted some stones. For instance, the marker near 3 Temple Hill Road appears on the large scale 1903 map, but not on the small-scale version of the same year, or on later editions, whilst that further along the same road does not seem to be marked on any maps, yet its location is consistent with its having been here since the boundary was instigated. Perhaps the fact that some stones have become (or were always) encased in walls has led to their being overlooked, but this does not explain those that have always been freestanding – unless they were obscured from view for a period by overgrown grass or shrubbery.

Boundary stone near 1 Hawthorn Villas, Barley Lane - This particular stone is marked on the OS map of 1919. Given the inconsistencies in the OS maps discussed above, however, it is possible that it is one of the series of markers put in place in 1871-72. In relatively recent years the area around the stone has become coated in concrete and the stone itself now acts as a defacto bollard.

References – Primary sources
1 Lighting of Towns (Ireland) Act, 1828 https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1828/act/82/enacted/en/print.html
2 Newry Improvement and Water Act, 1871 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/Vict/34-35/198/contents/enacted
3 ‘Newry Telegraph’ – 3 October 1871, p.3; 29 August 1872, p.3; 24 October 1872, p.3; 14 April 1874, p.2; 14 November 1889, p.3; 12 June 1897, p.3
4 ‘Newry Reporter’ – 29 July 1879, p.3; 4 June 1907, p.8
5 OS Maps, County series, Armagh sheet 46, Down sheet 50 – 1903-06, 1919, 1939

Secondary sources
6 Canavan, Tony, ‘Frontier town – An illustrated history of Newry’, (2nd ed., Drogheda, 2009), pp.114, 140-47
7 Information from Mr. John McCabe – October 2023

Online sources
8 https://issuu.com/visitmourne/docs/all_politics_is_local (accessed 29 November 2023
9 https://www.newry.ie/newry-100-years-ago/newry-s-municipal-boundary-stones-investigated (accessed 29 November 2023)
10 https://www.newryjournal.co.uk/history/1800-1900/town-boundary-from-1839/ (accessed 29 November 2023)

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
H-. Alterations detracting from building
J. Setting
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

R. Age
Z. Rarity
S. Authenticity
Y. Social, Cultural or Economic Importance
X. Local Interest

Evaluation

This granite boundary stone is one of 14 mainly identical markers set along Newry’s former municipal limits. Believed to have been put in place in 1871-72 (with several possibly later), all 14 are still largely intact and as a group constitute one of the most complete sets of such features in the whole of Northern Ireland. They are also, of course, important local artefacts, marking - both literally and metaphorically - the town’s growth and regional importance during the mid to later Victorian period. This particular stone is now partly encased in concrete but much of it is visible, and it remains of worth as part of the wider collection of such markers in Newry area.

General comments

Previous LQ HB16/LQ096