The Road to Conlig Station

This road through the estate from Clandeboye House to Helen’s Tower was nearing completion in May 1857 and was being top dressed with gravel from the spoil heaps at the lead mines, about a mile from here. According to Dufferin’s agent, it was almost impossible to procure the amount of sea gravel required for the job, so they were using mine tailings instead. However, the game keeper was complaining that it was poisoning the pheasants.[1] Such was the life of a land agent, don’t I know.

Just here might have been the junction with another new road, this one was to link the estate to a railway station at Conlig on the proposed Newtownards to Donaghadee line. The road was designed to rise gently across the contours, through the woods and out onto what is now Clandeboye Golf Course, before curling down the hill through Little Clandeboye, which had been purchased from the Pirrie family a couple of years earlier.[2] Lord Dufferin may even have purchased the land for this purpose, because he was unsure about what to do with the house, which he called an encumbrance and inconvenience and wondered if it could be leased to a Belfast merchant.[3]

Although Helen’s Bay may be noted for its remarkable Scottish Baronial style railway station, it was the planned railway line past Conlig that Lord Dufferin had his eye on when he engaged James Frazer to design a grand landscape for the estate.

Frazer’s working map even shows, as a dotted line, the proposed route of the Newtownards to Donaghadee railway line, with a station at Conlig. The promise of a direct link to Portpatrick in Scotland from Clandeboye was too appealing for Dufferin to miss and he became a keen supporter of the County Down Railway and the Portpatrick Steam Packet. The railway had already reached Newtownards in 1850 and by 1855 the company was seeking Dufferin’s support, which he readily gave.[4] The line was completed in 1861 but, as warned by his cousin in a letter a year earlier: “The scheme for establishing a communication between Belfast and Lough Ryan [Stranraer] is supported by most influential parties in this c[ounty] and if it succeeds I fear it will be a death blow to the Portpatrick Line”.[5]

These were indeed prophetic words, for the advantages of the short sea crossing were soon outweighed by a number of factors, including the disadvantages of the small size and exposure of Portpatrick harbour, compared with Stranraer.[6] Conlig did get its station, but it closed in 1865, so it was just as well that Frazer’s road was never built.

To add insult to injury, the railway station at Portpatrick eventually opened in September 1868, but closed again in November of the same year, never to reopen.[7]

[1] PRONI D1071/A/K/1/B/6/1 (22 May 1857)

[2] PRONI D1071/A/K/1/B/2/1 (June – October 1853)

[3] ibid

[4] PRONI D1071/H/V/1/11 (3 October 1855)

[5] PRONI MIC22/9 (14 January 1860)

[6] Masefield. Robin, 'Be Careful, Don't Rush' (Bayburn Historical Society, 2015), 33.