The Concrete Pillar

You shouldn’t have to look too carefully to find a concrete bollard beside the footpath just ahead of you, but it might take a leap of your imagination to guess why it is here. Maybe it will soon become obvious as I tell its story.

As long ago as 1946 plans were put in place to improve the road systems approaching Belfast. These were updated and added to in 1964 with a plethora of proposed motorways, including extending the proposed M3 to Bangor. The plans were reviewed in 1969 and the M3 was amongst those considered to be a realistic option for completion by 1986. Luckily for the precious landscape that we are walking through, the project was quietly abandoned in the late 1980s, but not before this post had been erected to mark its route across the countryside.

The M3 was to have been an extension of the dual carriageway that heads for Clandeboye from Bangor and then bears right by the cemetery. The proposal was that it would carry straight on, across the front drive into the Clandeboye estate and onwards through the Craigantlet hills to Redburn. Lord and Lady Dufferin were appalled at the proposition and decided to plant trees on either side of the front drive, with the help of local school children and even Tom King, the then Secretary of State. Their plan was to elicit local support to protect the trees if the motorway plans were to go ahead.

Had this road scheme been devised in the eighteenth century, the estate would have been successful in preventing this, because at that time new roads were not allowed to pass through planted walks or an avenue to any house. Nor could they pass through fields enclosed by walls higher than five feet. This may have been the reason that Lord Dufferin approached his neighbour Mr Ward of Bangor Castle in 1809, explaining that he wished to build his estate wall across the land of one of his tenants and proposing a land swap for a farm in Ballyholme to accommodate it. This went ahead, and the deed was signed in 1815. So Lord Dufferin was able to build his wall, presumably over five feet high, and soon after that a new road was built around the outside of the estate, linking the Belfast Road to the top of the Clandeboye Road. This road was later moved, when the Clandeboye lake was extended in 1886, and replaced by the Rathgael Road.

But back to the present: Just be thankful, as you walk past this insignificant concrete pillar, that you are not trying to cross the M3 to Bangor.

[1] www.wesleyjohnston.com/roads/motorwayhistory.html

[2] J T Fulton, "The Roads of County Down 1600-1900: The evolution of the road system of an Irish county" (Queen's Belfast, 1972), 46, 52.

[3] PRONI D1071/H/V/1/34 (14 November 1809)

[4] PRONI D4216/2/4/19 (12 January 1815)