BACK to Barry Island this week within our Barry and District. We take a brief look at the gatehouse associated with Friars Point House on the Westernmost end of Barry Island.

Gatehouse? Well, the modern term for such a freestanding building is given the name as a lodge. All great houses need a lodge don't they? A place that the keeper of the grounds can have a sit in home to look after things 24 hours, seven days a week with their family, and operate the Iron gateways into the estate.

The lodge is a tad dilapidated today, but it does have a story to tell.

Just before the major overhaul of Friars Point House, the Lodge comes into existence, maybe on the site of an earlier similar structure from the mid 1850's. The lodge if you ask me, Karl-James Langford, why is it important to us?

For one the Friars Point Lodge house is a survivor of when most others from the 1800s have now gone, and it is roughly thinking, built around 1895. The lodge is grade II Listed, and therefore protected from most demolition projects.

The lodge was most probably erected by the then owner of the West end Barry Island estate, the Lord Windsor. Things were changing at Barry Island hugely by 1895. And by 1900 the stately Friars Point House had been overhauled also, along with an iron gated entrance on stone pillars and walling. Much of the flora within the Friars Point House grounds had also been planted by 1900 also.

Our gatehouse is of dressed stone, rubble and brick built; at one stage looked very ornate. But the entrance porch wood work does contain some of the lodge house former glory. It would be my hope that the lodge could be restored back to its former glory.

More from our Barry and District next week.