placenamesBallymoney
Baile Muine
Two contrasting buildings beside Ballymoney Strand record the coast’s working past and its twentieth-century attraction as a place for seaside houses.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Baile Muine · Irish · main form · validated name
- Ballymoney · English · main form
Place & story
Watching the strand
Ballymoney Coastguard Station was built in 1874–75 to plans examined by Enoch Trevor Owen, assistant architect to the Board of Public Works. The two-storey range ends in a square watch tower with a pyramidal roof. Red-brick surrounds distinguish its windows against the roughcast walls. The architectural record notes occupation in 1901, vacancy in 1911 and closure in 1922; the building subsequently became a house overlooking the strand. [2]
White Walls
A different chapter of coastal building is represented by White Walls, a seaside villa erected in 1933 for Dr William Cooke, medical officer at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. The architectural survey records a later attribution to Samuel Dean of the Dublin practice Higginbotham and Stafford, while noting that an earlier published account gave a different explanation of its architect. The identification is therefore an attribution rather than a settled signature. [3]
A house for light and air
White Walls has a compact square plan, flat roof and canopied entrance. Its parapet enclosed a roof designed to serve as a sun deck, while corner windows and horizontal glazing patterns gave the elevations a distinctly modern character. The survey records surviving timber boarding inside, although replacement windows altered the original external appearance. It preserves a very different approach to seaside living from the nearby Victorian coastguard range. [3]
Geographic information
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Ballymoney. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Ballymoney Coastguard Station, NIAH15700738 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
- White Walls, NIAH15700737 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
- Ballymoney Beach, County Wexford illustration: based on a Ballymoney Beach, County Wexford (18 August 2013) by M Gray. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2026-08-06. How this page was prepared.