The History Of Just One Building
Although this website is a history of the village of Poyntzpass, it has one very particular weakness; it is my history of the village. It has been very much shaped by my personal interests, and the research I did to follow them up.
J’accuse…!
It’s all Hugh Daly’s fault!
When Hugh was doing his research at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) for his lecture “A Fatal Affair in The Far Pass”, he found a copy of the conveyance documenting the 1934 purchase by my father, Henry Clarke, of the property once known as The Railway Hotel or The Malt Kiln.
It stood opposite Poyntzpass Orange Hall, immediately east of the canal, on the site of the present Poyntzpass Baptist Church. It was by far the largest single building in the village.
The conveyance listed, in florid legalese, the earlier owners of the property and the dates of the transactions, and it triggered a desire to find out much more about my childhood home, and my own family history.
During the boredom and inactivity of the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 I decided to document my childhood memories of growing up in Poyntzpass, between my birth in 1951 and my leaving for university in 1969.
Hugh and I continued to correspond; he was in Belfast and I was in Cambridge (where I have lived from 1972). My sister Margaret then got involved; in her early 20s, having just graduated from Queen’s University, she had worked as a researcher at PRONI, where she quickly acquired a reputation as one of their best family history detectives. Much of the story that emerged is down to her extensive knowledge of Irish public records and how to navigate them.
Although the building’s history was my original focus, it quickly became obvious that the much more interesting story was that of the various families who owned it or had lived there.
So, what follows is both the story of this one building, from construction to eventful demolition, and the stories, in as much as I can unearth them, of those families.
Photographs
The earliest photographs we have of the Railway Hotel were both published as postcards. The first postcard, with the photograph of the man and boys and boat, was published by Hely’s of Dublin, and is likely to have been taken by W.J. Napier in the period 1910-1912. It is likely that the photograph of the “Edwardian gentlemen arriving” was taken by Napier on the same day. We have a used physical postcard which is postmarked “30 Dec 12” so that provides a latest date for the scenes.
Alan Clarke
Cambridge, 2025