Overview
In 1922 the IRA burned out the original Glenmona Lodge. What stands in Cushendun today is the rebuild: the house Clough Williams-Ellis raised from the surviving shell and finished in 1923, a few years before he began the Italianate fantasy of Portmeirion in Wales. For Glenmona he worked in a restrained Neo-Georgian manner, all symmetry and classical proportion, to anchor the seaside village he was laying out for Lord Cushendun. The house is not the roofless ruin it’s sometimes described as. It’s now owned by the National Trust, four of its rooms have been redecorated and can be hired, and it opens to visitors at weekends.
The honest thing to say is that Glenmona on its own is a modest stop. The reason to come is Cushendun around it, and the house is one good piece of that.
The fire and the rebuild
The first Glenmona Lodge went up around 1834 and was later enlarged. Its owner, Ronald John McNeill, became Lord Cushendun, a Unionist politician who rose to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. After the 1922 fire he brought in Williams-Ellis to rebuild, and the new house was complete by 1923. The National Trust bought it in 1954. It’s a Grade B listed building, gateway, piers and pillars included, and it sits on the Heritage at Risk register, which is the fair measure of it: cared for and used, but not fully out of the woods.
The village around it
Cushendun itself is the set piece. Williams-Ellis designed it in a Cornish style, whitewashed cottages around a square, for Lord Cushendun’s Penzance-born wife Maud, a deliberate departure from the usual Irish seaside look of the day. Next door to Glenmona, the former Church of Ireland, built in 1840 and deconsecrated in 2003, reopened in 2019 as the Old Church Centre, an arts, heritage and information space; it carries a blue plaque to the poet Moira O’Neill and opens mostly noon to 4pm, Friday to Sunday. A few minutes’ walk south is the sandy beach.
Visiting
Glenmona House opens 12 to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday, though those times can shift when events are on. There are free car parks next to the house and near the Corner House tea-room, but both are small, so on a busy summer weekend you may have to wait for a space. Wear something sturdy on your feet if you’re wandering the grounds. The best plan is to fold it into a wider trip: come at a weekend, take in the Old Church Centre next door and the beach a short walk on, then follow the coast. The Glens Great Grassland Trail loops through nearby meadow and coastal paths, while the wider Antrim Coast and Glens has the scenic drives and cliff walks, all within easy reach of County Antrim’s nine glens.