The road to the shore

The footprint of this popular car park lies on part of the three-mile avenue, laid out in 1850, that stretches from Clandeboye House to the shore at Helen’s Bay beach. If you cross Fort Road and carry straight on, along Grey Point, you will be walking along its final stretch to the shore.

Examination of the 1st Ordnance Survey map of 1834 reveals that this route predates the avenue and raises the question of when it was first built.[1]

This part of North Down was settled by James Hamilton during the plantation of Ulster and we are fortunate that, due to a dispute between him and Hugh Montgomery over their respective titles, Hamilton engaged Thomas Raven in 1626 to draw up maps of his lands.[2] The main features on the maps are the townlands; ancient administrative units of land, generally capable of then sustaining two families.[3] The road from Bangor, via Crawfordsburn, to Belfast is clearly marked on Raven’s map, but there is no sign of this one, so the road was almost certainly built after 1626. The fact that it is straight points towards the eighteenth-century, when funding for new roads carried a stipulation that they should be as straight as possible.

The townlands of Ballygrot and part of Ballyskelly were purchased in 1736 by the Blackwood family, and the title to the land was passed down through the generations to the fifteen-year-old Frederick, Lord Dufferin in 1841. But it was not until October 1850 that he engaged James Frazer, to improve the landscape of his newly renamed Clandeboye estate. One day they walked together to Grey Point and, as he wrote in his diary “Found that I was quite independent of the Crawfords [of Crawfordsburn] and that I possessed a mile of coast. Very glad of this”[4] . He immediately saw the potential of creating what he called his Sea Park complete with a mock fort, overlooking Belfast Lough. All that was required was an avenue from Clandeboye house.

This old road was an obvious candidate, so Frazer set about designing the avenue along its route, as well as laying out alternative roads to replace it, including the Craigdarragh and Bridge Roads.

Another part of Dufferin’s evolving plan, especially with the coming of the railway in 1865, was to create a seaside village, or what he called a bathing town.[5] Although his fort did not materialise, at least Frazer’s landscape plan was completed, providing Helen’s Bay with the wooded coastal path, access to the open countryside along the avenue, and the golf course with its landscaped woodlands.

What would have been a large part of the Sea Park is now occupied by the houses on Grey Point and Sheridan Drive. Fortunately, a portion beyond them remained undeveloped and has become a naturally rewilded addition to the Crawfordsburn Country Park, no longer independent of the Crawfords.

[1] PRONI Historic map viewer

[2] On display in the North Down Museum, Bangor

[3] Jonathan Bardon, The Plantation of Ulster (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2011), 115.

[4] PRONI D1071/H/V/1/5 (22 October 1850)

[5] PRONI D1071/H/V/1/11 (18 September 1855)