Historic thatched cottage to rise as community hub

A DEDICATED band of volunteers are preparing to go public with plans to restore and preserve an historic thatched cottage at Kilmore, with the emphasis very much on a community base.

And the Kilmore Oneilland Trust - established in 2021 - has reached this exciting stage thanks to a £10,000 grant from the Architectural Heritage Fund.

A charitable Trust, made up of nine unpaid volunteers and trustees, it was one of 10 groups across Northern Ireland to share in a £110,000 windfall to help ‘firm up’ and hone proposals to ensure the future of some of our most precious architectural gems.

Kilmore Cottage is one such gem and is in serious need of restoration before it is lost for good.

And thanks to the efforts of the Kilmore Oneilland Building Preservation Trust, the future is looking good.

The money has been used to fund a viability study, with drawings now prepared which are ready to be shown to people in the hope of grabbing feedback.

Other avenues of funding are also being explored which would help in the submission of a formal planning application once proposals have been finalised.

And, inevitably, the hope is that what is created will be self-sustaining from both a financial and environmental point of view, with both a residential and commercial element firmly in the trustees’ vision.

Kilmore Cottage appears on the first map of the area – dated 1707 – but is actually thought to date back to the 1600s. It has stood vacant since the 1980s.

Seventy years ago there were over 30,000 thatched cottages in Northern Ireland, but that number has sadly dwindled away to leave just over 100 still surviving

Trustee Conor Sandford - who studied archaeology at Queen’s University in Belfast - has, along with fellow volunteers, been a driving force to ensure Kilmore does not go the way of so many others lost forever.

“Buildings are not just buildings,” insists Conor. “They are more than bricks and mortar. They have a narrative and that is worth preserving.”

A very fair and apt observation from a man who has previously pushed himself in a 144km running challenge to try and raise the money to support the restoration of Kilmore Cottage, back when such hopes were hatched.

From the beginning of a vision to bring it back, Conor - now living in Belfast - is excited about the future.

Trustees have been meeting and are in the process of finalising plans for a community engagemen; it’s been a long road, involved many hours of discussion, outside-the-box thinking, logic and invention, and a drive and a passion to push forward.

Necessity may indeed be the mother of invention and that vital need to preserve has seen this hard-working group labour hard to deliver the rebirth of an architectural icon.

Having nurtured their plans through infancy, they are ready to send them out into the world to see how they stand up on their own.

Admittedly, there have been teething problems and it’s been a while coming about but, like proud parents, Conor and Co have been delighted to watch their project grow.

But what exactly is on the cards? Plenty, truth be told!

As Conor explained: “The Kilmore Cottage is one of very few thatched buildings remaining in Northern Ireland and one of the fewer still in a village setting where a scheme of restoration and renewal is possible, albeit only with considerable grant support.

“We had been given the grant from the Archictural Heritage Fund to look at different options and viability, because it’s all well and good doing up an old building, but what’s it going to be used as? People say it would be a nice museum but that’s not going to happen. Or it would be a cafe, but you’re not really addressing anything more than the building. So we looked at different options for the building.

“One of them was do it up for a house, but the amount of money that that would cost, it just was not viable in any way, shape or form. The conservation deficit, as they call it, was massive, hundreds of thousands of pounds.

“And you would not get the community benefits out of that just with somebody living in it.

“There are limitations with a building like that and obviously we want to keep the roof thatched, but that has a high cost, so we need to bring in some money once we get it done.

“Our completed viability study found that the only viable option is a mixed-use scheme involving residential, commercial and community aspects.

“We looked at the wider outbuildings in the yard and so our viable option - which is viable if we get grant funding - is to do the cottage as residential, have somebody living it, and that would keep the cottage aspect. And then there’s an old shed to the north - which was known locally as the Reading Room - and that’s going to become an agile community space.

“Basically what that means is the community can book space in that, if there’s a local group. The next stage of development is to write to all these groups and show them our plans. We actually have sketch plans drawn up.

“That agile community space would hold 30 or 35 people; there’s a wee kitchen and a disabled access toilet.

“It could be booked for birthday parties and things like that; there’s a heritage group locally could book it for its talks. It would be like a mutual space. There are church halls and Orange Halls and other places but they’re not really inclusive in that respect.

“It’s about creating a space to tackle some of the issues we know exist.”

The Trust has already undertaken a community survey, the response to which had been described as “heartening”, with various “pressing issues” - such as rural isolation and lack of access to key services - identified.

These concerns had been taken into consideration when trustees gathered to consider future proposals, which will now go to the next stage - going back to the people to ask, essentially, how did we do and what do you think?

Said Conor: “Some of the responses were quite emotive around rural isolation and loneliness and access to services. There’s no bus that goes through Kilmore, for example. We have a post box, that’s about it, and two or three churches about the area.

“The scheme basically is cottage for residential and there’s a private bit of ground beside it for whoever lives there, then there’s the Reading Room aspect which is an agile community space, which can be rented on a commercial basis.

“There’s a lot of people still working from home and could use a small space like that to do an away day or something.

“That commercial aspect subsidises the community use and then the yard becomes a community parklet.

“Kilmore doesn’t have a centre, a nucleus as such. It used to be the road. In all the old photographs you see people standing out on the road, with bread carts going up the road, but with lorries and traffic and that now it’s 100 years since that was possible.

“This is about creating a space, so the yard becomes a community parklet for people, with a few benches and a couple of wee allotments, so that people can come together. It would be closed at night but it would be open during the day for people to come and sit. We could have a coffee van there. We could see if there’s a local group that works with people with learning difficulties that would run a coffee shop in the agile space once a month. These are things we could look at.

“There’s a stable building too. That will become a commercial unit that could be rented out. Then there’s another wee space that could be used as an office space or for a community group.”

Of course, above all, it’s important that, once developed, Kilmore Cottage can function without exorbitant running costs.

After all, the Kilmore Oneilland Building Preservation Trust, as stated, is a ‘charitable’ organisation. Its members earn no wage; rather, their reward comes simply in knowing their good works will prove the salvation of the lapsed soul of Kilmore, knowing to do nothing now would damn it to dereliction and destruction beyond any intervention.

“We are taking a bit of a risk to take this on but it has to be run sustainably,” Conor accepted. “It has to pay for itself and it has to have significant community benefit.

“We have carried out the work. We have our website, our logo, we are building our brand.”

The community survey - which was also run online - was positively received and brought in responses from as far away as Canada and the United States.

The intention now will be to organise further engagements, which will also include posting fliers through doors in the area to gauge opinion.

“We hope to have another formal community consultation event in the coming months, when we hope to get more formal feedback from the community on how our plans address the needs they have identified,” added Conor.

“At that time we will be presenting what we have done so far to the community. It’s not just about Kilmore, it’s about the wider rural area. There’s lots of good work being done by other groups too in the local area and it’s about connecting those ideas up maybe, connecting rural communities.

“We will be able to invite everyone along and show them drawings.

“Then we can ask do you think this will work, what do you think of it, what changes do you want made? Does anyone have a group out there that would make use of a space like this? We just need to build up that picture.

“It’s been great so far - people really want to see something being done.

“It has got such potential to regenerate, not just in terms of character but the tourist and recreational reuse.

“We’d love the cottage to be restored. It’s not just the restoration of a building, this is the restoration of a community.”

l Are any Ulster Gazette readers members of existing groups which might have a use for the proposed agile community space, or have any other ideas, thoughts or potential partnership working ideas? A more formal consultation on how the plans address the needs the community has already identified will take place shortly. You can get in touch by email at TheKilmoreCottage@gmail.com, or visit the website - under development - www.kilmoreoneillandtrust.com