2009:257 - DUNDRUM: Blundell's House, Down

Three small trenches were excavated at Blundell’s House with a view to informing the future management strategy for this monument in state care. Two of the trenches were located within the interior of the building’s east wing, whilst the other trench was located immediately to the south of the building’s east wing.

Blundell’s House is a ruined, post-medieval, L-shaped two-storeyed house located on the southern edge of the lower ward of the Anglo-Norman castle of Dundrum. Inspection of the architectural fabric of the ruin indicates that the house was the product of more than one phase of construction, and that its east wing was probably built upon the site of at least one earlier, and presumably medieval, structure. The dressed stone around the windows and doors of the ruin has apparently been systematically robbed and replaced by harled rubble. Interpretation of the different phases of construction and alteration witnessed in the fabric of Blundell’s House is complicated by a number of apparent episodes of reconstruction and repair in the modern period. The most complete published description of Blundell’s House is contained within the section on Dundrum Castle published in the Archaeological Survey of County Down (1966, 210–11), although this account should probably not be considered a definitive narrative of the site’s architectural sequence. The front of the east wing, which appears to be the latest element of the building, contains a number of triangular pediments located above the windows, which presumably held either stone or plaster armorials and relief sculptures; these features are closely paralleled by two buildings in south-west Scotland that date to the 1630s (Stell 1986, 87, 110–12). The earliest representation of Blundell’s House is in a drawing of Dundrum Castle dated to 1758, which depicts the building’s east wing as a roofless ruin and thereby provides a terminus ante quem for the end of the building’s occupation.

The two trenches in the interior of the east wing contained no deposits or features contemporary with the house’s occupation. The original floor of the building had been removed and the earliest surviving deposit overlying the surface of the near horizontal rock-cut platform upon which the east wing was built was a soil that had accumulated after occupation of the site had ended. This soil was capped by a thin mortar-rich deposit that represented an episode of repair to the ruin’s fabric in the middle of the 20th century. This horizon was overlain by another thin accumulation of soil that was in turn cut by a number of modern drains and sealed by a deposit of aggregate and gravel which forms the present-day ground surface within the ruin.

The external trench, which extended outwards from the east wing’s southern wall, demonstrated that only a single course of masonry extended below the modern ground surface and that the walls of the east wing had been built directly upon the surface of a platform cut into the bedrock. Nor were there any archaeological horizons in the external trench contemporary with the house’s occupation, although an interesting sequence was observed which suggested that the grounds immediately around the house were deliberately modified, presumably in the first half of the 18th century, to make them conform to contemporary naturalistic and picturesque ideals of landscape. This involved the construction of a terrace extending up to 5m to the south of the east wing that was retained by a mortared stone revetment built at a deliberate angle of 45° to the horizontal and finished to resemble a natural outcrop of bedrock. The revetment retained a thick deposit of rubble that contained a large number of intact roofing 'slates’ (actually manufactured from local shale), suggesting that the dismantling of the building’s roof was contemporary with the construction of the terrace. Evidence for a second, lower terrace constructed to the south of the angled revetment was also uncovered as similar deposits of rubble and intact roofing 'slates’ were uncovered beyond the revetment. The southern edge of this lower terrace was probably removed during the construction of the visitor carpark located to the south of Blundell’s House. It is reasonable to assume that the dressed stone and lintels associated with the building’s doors and windows, as well as the east wing’s floor, were also removed during this episode of alteration to the building and its immediate surroundings. Unfortunately, no artefactual dating evidence was recovered to refine the terminus ante quem provided by the 1758 drawing for the deliberate slighting and transformation of Blundell’s House into a picturesque ruin.

References
Anon. 1966 An Archaeological Survey of County  Down. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Belfast.
Stell, G. 1986 Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Dumfries and Galloway. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Edinburgh.