’The Village Inn’

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Two storey terraced public house ‘The Village Inn’ on the N end of Main Street in the village of Kircubbin.

Front SW elevation has right of centre timber panelled entrance door with three modern (but in mock ‘olde worlde’ style) windows, with that to far right much larger than other two. Long timber painted pub sign above windows and door. Flat arch coach doorway to right of entrance door, with large timber panelled ‘door’. First floor has four modern three pane timber windows, with traditional projecting pub sign between first and second windows and an internally illuminated PVC sign between third and fourth windows. Spotlights to right of each first floor window. Facade finished in rough cast render with short chamfered plinth.

Large full height gabled return with flat roofed extension to rear.

Roof pitched with Bangor blue slates, two concrete block chimney stacks and four solar panels. Cast iron gutters and down spouts.

Historical information

The sign above this pub proclaims that it was established in 1764, a date which the current owners (1997) suggested could well be true as the earliest deeds concerning the property date from the eighteenth century. A building is also shown on this site on the OS Map of 1834. Despite undoubted great age, however, this terrace has witnessed successive renovation, not least of all the amalgamation of the two former properties of No.34 & 36 into one. A photograph from the W.A. Green Collection (now held at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum) from c.1910, shows that No.34 was the original inn and had a doorway in the place of the now second window from the left. The large window to the far left, though it looks at first glance to have been enlarged, has been this size at least since the date of this photograph also.

[For short history of Kircubbin see ref. HB24/02/000.]

References- Primary sources
1 Pigot & Co.s “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.]
2 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps, 1st Edition, 1834, Co. Down 18.
3 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]
4 PRONI VAL 1B/311A & B 1st valuation, Inishargy, c.1835.
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.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Somewhat altered two storey public house of probable eighteenth century origin set in the midst of a terrace. The front façade now has mock 'olde world' window frames and an internally illuminated pub sign. A former doorway is now filled with a window. The interior is largely modern.