Main Street

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Main Street Kircubbin is filled with mainly two storey terraced houses, shops and offices. Many dwellings at the SE end of the Street have been ‘modernised’ and are of little architectural merit, others retain many original features, but none could be said to be wholly original. The NE side of the street is probably generally of greater age than the opposite side and probably contains some of the towns oldest buildings. (See individual refs).

Historical information

Most textbooks date the origin of Kircubbin to the year 1790, when one of the larger local landowners, the Baillie family, began to grant favourable leases and encourage the development of the village. A not insubstantial settlement, however, existed before this date, the 1834 OS Memoirs noting that some houses had been built in the 1760s, and the beginnings of what was to become Main Street shown on Taylor’s and Skinner’s map of 1777. Some of the eighteenth century dwellings are probably still standing (though perhaps slightly altered), for instance Nos.34-42, but most date from the opening decades of the nineteenth century, a period when both trade and small manufactures flourished in the area.

References- Primary sources
1 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps, 1st Edition, 1834, Co. Down 18.
2 PRONI Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), p. 84-5. [c.1834].
3 PRONI VAL 1B/311A & B 1st valuation, Inishargy, c.1835.
4 Pigot & Cos “City of Dublin and Hibernian Provincial Directory” (Manchester 1824), pp. 417-18. [Description of the town of Kircubbin etc. in c.1824. See also Slater’s “Directory” for 1846, 1856 and 1870, original copies of which are currently held at the Linenhall Library, Belfast.]
5 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps, 1st revision, 1860, Co. Down 18.
6 PRONI 2nd valuation, Inishargy, c.1863.
7 UFTM WAG 1837 W.A. Green Collection- Photograph of Main Street, Kircubbin, c.1910.
8 PRONI D.3302 Heron Family Papers [Not yet listed.]

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Unpretentious main street with mainly two storey dwellings and shops of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century origin, but much altered in recent times.