Original Gateway to Holestone House

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

A gateway comprising four octagonal stone piers, a set of ironwork gates, and railings on low plinth walls, flanked each side by curving re-entrant walls. The gateway faces south.

The piers are octagonal, of regular coursed granite, panelled, with angled base, rounded stringcourse, and moulded cornice, surmounted by a large ball finial.
Gates are of spear-headed wrought iron with base and intermediate panels of intersecting motifs.
The intervening plinth walls are of granite ashlar with angled base and moulded coping, carrying wrought iron railings of similar spear-headed type but less intricate pattern.
To the outer extremities of the outer pillars are short ashlar granite link walls, with humped copings, abutting the curved re-entrant walls to each side; copings now missing from left-hand link wall.
Curved re-entrant walls are of snecked basalt, with humped granite copings. Dressed copings cease where curved walls meet the front boundary estate walls to each side; boundary wall of roughly coursed basalt rubble, but much fragmented to the west.

SETTING: The gateway stands in a rural area facing onto the main road. It originally led to the main driveway to Holestone House but that driveway has now been closed just beyond the gateway and is partly absorbed into a field. Holestone House still remains visible from the gateway but is now approached from the west.
Standing to the rear of the gateway to the east side of the former driveway is a plain single storey gate lodge originally of ashlar granite with hipped slated roof, but now enlarged with smooth rendered extensions. Owing to the closure of the main gateway it is approached by a driveway behind the western boundary wall.

Historical information

Built for James Owens JP, DL, as the main gateway to Holestone House, presumably c 1836 when the wall around the deerpark was built. The gateway and a gate lodge appear on the OS map of 1857; not shown on the 1833 map. Holestone House itself (HB20/06/011) was built in 1827.

References – Primary Sources
1. OS Map 1857, Co Antrim 51.
2. Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, Vol 29: Parishes of County Antrim XI, 1832-3, 1835-9 (Belfast, 1995), pp 138, 150.
Secondary Sources
1. R.M. Young, Belfast and the Province of Ulster (Brighton, 1909), p 230.
2. R.R. Cox, The Parish of Kilbride (Doagh, 1959), pp 86 and 87.
3. UAHS, West Antrim (Belfast, 1970), p 20.
4. C.E.B. Brett, Buildings of County Antrim (UAHS, Belfast, 1996), p 96.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
D. Plan Form
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

X. Local Interest

Evaluation

This is a set of early to mid-19th century masonry piers, with ornamentally treated iron gates and railings, of distinctive style and proportion, which are of special interest as the original entrance to the grounds of Holestone House, a fine late Georgian classical house.