Straid Congregational Church

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Attached Congregational Church, dated 1857, located at the corner of Irish Hill Road and Main Street in the village of Straid. Loose cruciform plan with further gabled projection to south, and diagonal porch to re-entrant angle. Modern two-storey hall attached to north-west.

Roofs are pitched and natural slated with clay ridge tiles; heavy timber fretted bargeboards with dropped finials to gables. Walls are pebbledashed over smooth rendered plinth with contrasting rendered platbands and sill courses, and stepped quoins. Gothic windows with leaded lights in narrow smooth architraves, masonry sills.

Principal elevation faces south east and is four bays wide. Bays two and four (from left) project and are gabled; bay one has a window, bay two contains two windows and is surmounted by rendered bell-cote, comprising chamfered pillars supporting a moulded cornice; to north east face, a modern boarded timber door with stained glass fanlight over in Tudor-arched opening, and single window. Bay three is longer, with two windows to left and porch to internal angle with bay four, traditional roof light. Porch has Tudor-arched recess springing from impost with Tudor-arched vertically sheeted entrance door flanked to each side by narrow pointed arch-headed windows. Bay four has two windows.

South west elevation comprises (with gable to right) two modern square headed windows at ground floor, one similar to first floor. Abutted at left by two-storey hall with chimney projection.

North west elevation completely abutted by modern hall.

North east elevation - facing Main Street - projecting central gable containing two windows, flanked to either side by transepts, each containing single window. Datestone to apex is inscribed, ‘Ebenezer Erected 1816, Rebuilt and enlarged 1857’.

Setting

Enclosed by plain cast-iron railings with support brackets (partly with hedge) on rendered masonry dwarf wall with stone corner protectors (4 no.) with two pairs of slender cast-iron columns, one on south east boundary opposite porch having lost its gate in January 2018, the second pair to rear south west boundary complete with gate.

Roof: Natural slate
Walling: Pebbledash, smooth rendered details (likely all cementitious)
Windows: Gothic headed with rendered surrounds and masonry sills
Rainwater goods: uPVC

Historical information

The Congregational Church – originally known as ‘Separatists’ or ‘Independents’ - emerged as a splinter movement from the Church of England in the later 16th century. Rejecting many Anglican practices as ‘Popish’, believing in liberty of conscience and (unlike Presbyterianism) the independence of each congregation, they suffered as a result of their convictions. Adherents of this cause appeared in Ireland in the 1640s and became more numerous under the Commonwealth, but in the succeeding decades survived as a minor dissenting sect with only six Independent congregations recorded in the Kingdom in 1695. The movement remained fairly insignificant throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, being depleted largely through emigration. The Ulster Revival of 1859 witnessed a marked growth in numbers, and the founding of many new congregations, mainly in eastern Ulster, with the Donegall Street Congregational Church in Belfast becoming the Mother Church for the sect in Ireland

Straid Congregational Church is one of the few with pre-1859 roots, tracing its origins to 1816, when local landlord, Henry Clements Ellis (d.1826), is said to have provided both a plot of land and the materials for the building of a meeting house. But although a structure (actually the south-eastern end of a long row of buildings stretched along the west side of Main Street) appears on this site of the present north-eastern section on the 1832 OS it is not captioned. The building is described in the 1840 OS Memoirs as ‘one storey high, slated and…47x17 feet in the clear and pretty well lit with five circular segment windows, arched’; inside there were ‘no pews but forms’, an earth floor and the minister (Rev. James Bain) residing ‘in an apartment attached’.

A local historian states that in 1842 ‘three new windows' were inserted ‘to improve light' - a likely replacement of the original windows to the rear - also work to bond the earthen floor, all carried out by members of the congregation. Further changes were put forward in late 1856 when the congregants agreed ‘to enlarge the sanctuary and incorporate the old building into the new one’, based on plans ‘drawn up by an architect, Mr McCullough…creating a cruciform church by adding an extension to the middle of the south west facing side of the old building which was largely rebuilt.’ They also decided - apparently on the recommendation of the Irish Evangelical Society – to raise the roof by six feet. An inscription on the building itself, records these changes, stating that the church was ‘Rebuilt and enlarged [in] 1857’. On the revised OS map of 1857 the shallow projecting bay is shown on the road-facing wall of the north-eastern section, as well as the new extension to the rear. But it was not until 1861-63, as a consequence of the Revival of 1859, that the building achieved its present form, when the southern projection, (which appears to have originally contained a library, vestry and schoolroom), was added as well as the gallery, ‘a new matching entrance on the east wing of the sanctuary’, (presumably the porch), and a new pulpit.

In 1870 roof repairs were made and two years later stoves installed, with further efforts made to improve heating in 1900 (possibly involving the installation of the timber ceiling; the ceilings in the vestry, library and schoolroom were replaced in 1929. The later 1930s witnessed the application of the present render, the replacement of the window frames with leaded lights and the introduction of electricity. The building was completely redecorated in 1950 at which point the present pipe organ was fitted, with the modern rear extensions added in 1970-71 (the two storey block to the north west) and 1981-82 (the two storey 'tail' to the composition which mimics in style the 1861 work). Much of this was reportedly also undertaken by the congregation themselves.

The Ellis holdings in Straid were acquired by the Downshire estate in 1847, and the lease of the plot on which this church stands remains with this estate.

References – Primary sources
1 OS maps, Co Antrim sh. 46 1832, 1857, 1902
2 OS Memoirs, 1840
3 Copy deed ralting to the lease of site of Straid Congregational Trust, 1 December 1871

Secondary sources
1 Information from local historian (July 2017)

Online sources
1 https://www.carrickfergustimes.co.uk/news/straid-church-celebrates-its-bicentenary-1-7326780 [accessed 21 March 2018]

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
D. Plan Form
H-. Alterations detracting from building
J. Setting

Criteria for listing: historic interest

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

Evaluation

Straid Congregational church is thought to be the oldest of its type in the whole of Ireland, the present structure dating largely from 1857-62 and probably containing the fabric of the original meeting house of 1816. An interesting palimpsest, its relatively low-profile betrays something of its more humble early 19th century beginnings, whilst its unusual footprint reveals much of its mid-1800s evolution, from simple ‘barn’ structure through 1850s T-plan to the post-Revival U-shaped form, by which stage the building also contained a school. Prominently set in the centre of the village whose origins and growth owe much to the presence of the church itself, it has retained much of its mid-Victorian appearance and detailing externally, including an usual diagonally set porch, decorative bargeboards, and a small bellcote, and remains a valuable part of Northern Ireland’s religious heritage.