Recently, for the first time, I stayed in a holiday home in Portpatrick that wasn’t my own. It was in Dinvin Street, a road that even after forty years of visiting Portpatrick I still wasn’t very familiar with. The house was clean, comfortable and well apportioned, with things that my own cottage lacked (Space! Wifi! A shower that didn’t drip through the ceiling!), but it was clear that it was old and, as estate agents like to say, retained some original features. So I naturally went straight to the internet to research its history, and that of Dinvin Street as a whole, and this is what I found.
Dinvin Street is a quiet, little used road, leading from Main Street and running parallel to the Dinvin Burn as far as the putting green. In the nineteenth century, there was just one row of houses along its north side, with the Burn on its south side. Some time in the second half of twentieth century a small row of bungalows was added towards the Main Street end. The older row (which I will concentrate on) was most likely built in the 1830s, as part of the expansion of Portpatrick in anticipation of it becoming a major port for Ireland. Although the houses in the row form a single terrace, they are all different in size and appearance, suggesting that they were not all built to a shared plan, but added to each other piecemeal by different owners. All but one are double-fronted and sizeable, and all have quite large gardens behind, albeit ascending a steep bank. For a while in the mid-nineteenth century, the harbour branch of the Portpatrick railway ran behind the gardens, dropping precariously down a 1 in 35 slope to its station, on the site of the modern tennis courts and bowling green.
The house in which I stayed is on the end of the row furthest from the putting green. When built it had six rooms, two either side of the entrance hall and two upstairs. It has been modernised throughout (more estate agent speak), but there are two Victorian fire places, though it isn’t clear if they are originals. Outside the back door, an alleyway runs along the length of the house, with a formidable whitewashed retaining wall behind, punctuated by a flight of steps leading to the sloping garden, which may have once been a 'kailyard' for growing vegetables to supplement the family's diet. Old maps confirm that the retaining wall is an original feature. Three dingy alcoves are built into it, that were likely once the privy, ash pit and coal (or peat) store. Around the garden is a splendid stone wall. Through the smooth twenty-first century modernisations, it is clear what the house would have looked like in the nineteenth century.
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| The end house is the smallest of the row of houses built in the 1830s on Dinvin Street |
So who built and lived in the house? The short answer is, the McClymont family - or one branch of it; McClymont is a common name in Portpatrick. In 1841, its owner was James McClymont, a 45-year old builder, who was born in Portpatrick, son of a quarryman, and his wife, Margaret. It seems highly likely that he built the house, and possibly others in Dinvin Street. Its six rooms made it fairly spacious by Portpatrick standards, but it was smaller than others in Dinvin Street, and would still have seemed crowded, as in 1841 no fewer than eleven people were listed as living in it: James and his wife, their seven children, aged from 5 to 20, and Margaret’s 80-year-old mother, Elizabeth Kerr and sister, also Elizabeth. How such a range of people were accommodated, one can only guess, but the house may have been fitted with ‘box beds’, which were common at the time, to allow individuals a degree of privacy. The kitchen, with a hob or range for cooking, was likely the only communal room.
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| The rear of the house, from the top of the steeply sloping garden. Note the retaining walls at the bottom of the slope |
By 1851, the household was down to seven: James and Margaret and four, now mostly adult children, and Margaret’s sister Elizabeth. Their son George, now 26, was also a builder, presumably working for his father, and the adult girls earned their living as dressmakers. In 1861, James and Margaret, now in their sixties, still lived with George, who was unmarried at the age of 36, and two unmarried daughters, Elizabeth, 40 and Grace, 27, still dressmakers.
In 1871 the household was down to three, James and Margaret having passed away. George, now owner of the house, was still unmarried, as were his sisters Elizabeth and Grace. But in 1873, George married Margaret Boyd from Aberdeen, over 20 years his junior, and they had a son, named John. In 1881 the household of George, his wife Margaret, sisters Elizabeth and Grace and son John was still intact, but George died suddenly in 1883, aged 54.
By 1891 there was just Margaret and her 18-year-od son John rattling around the six-room house. John was a fisherman, but gave up the sea to become a labourer on the Dunskey Estate. They were still there in 1901, but by 1911, Margaret had died and John had married Isabella Stewart, from Leswalt, who was aged 38, as was John. They apparently had no children and continued to live in the house until the 1920s, the third generation of the McClymont family to own it.
This pattern of ownership matches that of my own cottage in Colonel Street, another end house that was built by Robert Shearer in 1824 for himself and his family, and was passed on first to his daughter and then to her nieces; the family owning it for seventy years in all.
Eventually John and Isabella left the house, ending some ninety years of owner-occupation by the McClymont family. By this time, the houses on Dinvin Street had names, which some retain, and the end house was was named ‘Cliftonville’. In 1930 it was owned and lived in by James Allen, who before retirement had farmed Common Croft, now part of Sunnymeade caravan site. He was an elder of Portpatrick kirk and sang in the church choir. But after he died in 1938, aged 86, the house gained a new owner-occupier – one James McClymont, a retired farm worker from Leswalt, and his wife Helen. So a century after James McClymont the builder was listed as living in the end house of Dinvin Street, the wheel had come full circle.
What
of the rest of Dinvin Street? No other dwelling in the road had the
same continuity of ownership and occupancy. Instead, over the course
of the century for which records can be accessed (1840-1940),
ownerships changed hands and tenants came and went, reflecting the
whole cross-section of Portpatrick’s demographic. In the
mid-nineteenth century, some of the houses were divided into flats,
with tenants, sometimes with large families, living in one or two
rooms. Naturally, such tenants were from the poorer end of the
spectrum, fishermen and their families, or widows managing on
whatever provision their late husbands had been able to make for
them. At other times, the comparatively large houses had just one or
two occupants, sometimes retired or ‘living on their own means’.
A couple of houses were occupied by serving or retired coastguards.
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| Dinvin Street from the sea end. The houses are all slightly different to each other, in size and design. In the mid-nineteenth century, several were 'houses of multiple occupation', but by the early twentieth century most were single-occupancy |
The largest house in Dinvin Street was owned from the 1870s by John McDowall, a house carpenter, and his wife Elizabeth, who for a time ran a grocers shop on the premises. John McDowall owned other properties in Portpatrick, and in 1895 he bought my cottage in Colonel Street, renovated it and sold it on to his son Andrew, a railway telegraph clerk who supplemented his wages with the rental income. After a few years, he sold it to Jane Smith, a laundress who at one time had lived with her mother – in Dinvin Street. Such connections were of course commonplace in such a small and tightly-knit village.
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| The houses at the sea end of Dinvin Street on Dean Place, apparently named for a William Dean who owned the properties there at one time, are now known as Mansewood and the Spout House. Mansewood was originally occupied by Portpatrick’s Free Church minister, the formidable Rev. Andrew Urquhart, but when the Free Church rejoined the Kirk, it became a boarding house. |
In
the early twentieth century, John McDowall’s Dinvin Street house
was passed on to his unmarried daughter Isabella, who used it as a
holiday home and in 1915 advertised it as a short-term holiday let –
there is nothing new under the sun in Portpatrick. But in 1925
Isabella’s ownership came to a tragic end when she committed
suicide at the age of 59 by hanging herself in a workshop in the
garden of the house, apparently out of anxiety at her adopted
daughter, Minnie Pattinson’s marriage, which had happened the
previous day.Who could have imagined such passion and violence within the bland, whitewashed walls of Dinvin Street.
Today, Dinvin Street is a quiet, rather out-of-the-way place, and one suspects that the end house is not the only one in the road that is a holiday home. But it was well worth the five-star review we gave it, and the ghosts of the McClymont family kept to themselves – as hopefully does the ghost of poor Isabella McDowall, a few doors down the road. But next time I visit Portpatrick, I will stay in my own cottage – leaking shower and all!
Sources Used
Census
returns, valuation rolls and birth, marriage and death certificates available
at Scotland’s People
Newspaper articles available at the British Newspaper Archive
Historic maps available at the National Library of Scotland
