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Pound Forge

Map Location: Town Area, 24

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A whitewashed forge sits with its door open, the room inside very dark.

The low thatched building was built in the early 1700s and was originally situated on the Lower Ballinderry Road, midway between the villages of upper and lower Ballinderry, County Antrim. It was dismantled and moved to the Folk Museum in the 1990s.

This building once contained both a farmhouse and a forge. The combination of house and blacksmith’s forge in a single long house arrangement is rare. A forge with a thatched roof is exceptional because of the risk of fire.

The dwelling part of the structure is a good example of a vernacular building of the 1700s. Local and family tradition suggests that it could be much older and may date to the middle of the 1600s.

For generations the building was known as the Pound Farm and it was the property of the Magee family. The name of the farm comes from the previous existence of a cattle pound on the site. A pound was an enclosure in which strayed animals were confined.

Pound Farm at one time contained a grocery shop with a post box as well as a forge.  Across the road from the house was the Pound Public House.

Now re-erected in the town area it is interpreted as being the house and business premises of a bachelor blacksmith of the early 1900s.