12 Shane's Terrace

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

A single storey terrace house with attic, built of basalt with brick dressings. Main entrance faces south-west.

Roof of Bangor blue slates in regular courses; dark toned ridge tiles; one small original flush rooflight to right, with an original gabled dormer to left. Dormer roof slated as previous, with timber barge boards of fretted pattern; cheeks of dormer slated as previous; front of dormer contains a rectangular timber fixed light with a side-hung casement, all plate glass, set in a timber frame with horizontal boarding to gable above. Chimney on ridge of roof, to left-hand extremity, common with adjoining house to left: red brick with projecting brick cornice; three pots; two television aerials attached. Three courses of modern red brick for rebuilt blocking course of chimney, but of greater width and depth than originally.
Wall of coursed hammer-dressed basalt rubble with fine jointing slightly recessed. Projecting red brick eaves course. Cast iron guttering with cast iron downpipe.

Front elevation contains one window to the left of the doorway, both set in red brick block surrounds with flat arch to head. Window is a rectangular timber sliding sash, vertically hung, 1 over 1 with horns, with exposed sash box; projecting concrete cill. Doorway contains a modern rectangular timber 2-panel glazed door, varnished brown, with translucent glazing, set below a translucent glazed rectangular fanlight, all in a timber surround; modern metal letterbox; modern tiled doorstep level with front path.

Rear elevation is two-storey with the original rear wall and rear return built up beyond original height: Bangor blue slates to rear roof above later extension; flat roof to extension. Walls rendered with a wet dash of crushed black stones; timber fascia to eaves; PVC gutters and downpipe; PVC soil pipe; modern rectangular timber windows, fixed lights with top-hung vents; projecting concrete cills. Rear door, in side of rear return is modern rectangular timber 2-panel, with upper panel of translucent glazing.
Recessed area between rear wall and return is concrete.

SETTING: The house stands in a terrace of 14 houses which faces the main road but is set back from it with gardens in front. The houses alternate in pairs with handed plans. Front garden is grassed with a concrete paved path to the front pedestrian gateway and across front of the house. Gateway consists of a small modern painted iron gate set in painted square timber posts. Front garden bounded by hedges.
Across the rear elevation is a gravelled communal driveway. Beyond rear driveway is a line of basalt rubble outhouses or garages, some with rendering to side walls. Garage for this house is detached: PVC gutter and metal downpipe; Bangor blue slates; modern steel up-and-over garage door.

Historical information

Built by the O'Neill family as one of a terrace of cottages for workers on the Shane's Castle estate; precise date of terrace not known, but it appears for the first time on the OS map of 1903, the entire site being shown as empty on the OS map of 1858. It may be tentatively dated to the 1860s. An old photograph shows diagonal pattern quarry glazing in both sashes of both windows in the west gable of the terrace, and the first survey in 1970 recorded that one house retained lattice paned sashes to the front and to the fanlight, which suggests that all windows were similarly glazed originally.

References – Primary Sources
1. OS Map 1903, Co Antrim 43.

Secondary Sources
1. UAHS, Antrim and Ballymena (Belfast, 1969), p 27 (item no 25).
2. R. Pierce and A. Coey, Taken for Granted (NIHBC, 1984), p 66.
3. DOE Planning Service, Randalstown Conservation Area booklet (Ballymena, 1996), pp 7 and 56-57 (old photographs showing the terrace).

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
H-. Alterations detracting from building
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

X. Local Interest

Evaluation

This is a distinctly proportioned mid-Victorian house in an overall plain style which has lost some of its original interior and exterior features, most notably the lattice glazing to its front windows and fanlight, but despite this, together with the rest of the houses in the terrace it still forms a group of definite character.