The Speckled Hen, Derriaghy

The claim

A remodelled bar and restaurant on the Derriaghy Road outside Lisburn, with a real fire, a garden and two dining rooms behind the public bar. The house dates itself to 1660 and trades four days a week, having reopened in April 2024 after a year closed. In January 2026 its owner was granted permission to demolish it and build two houses; that consent is not a closure, and the bar was still open and being inspected through the summer.

What the records show

The 1660 is the house's own. The Irish News, reporting the demolition application on 13 May 2025, says the pub in the parish of Derriaghy reportedly dates back to that year and attributes the claim to the house rather than to any record; no licence, deed or directory entry for 1660 has been traced, and the Troubles aside, Ireland's early licensing papers largely went with the Public Record Office in 1922. What the paper does hold is the house under three names. The Department for Communities' Historic Environment Division lists 47 Derriaghy Road as reference HB19/21/013, "The Village Inn (formerly Traveller's Rest)", recorded use public house — and its grade is "record only", which means the register knows the building and has not listed it. The document the Department supplied to the planning application says the same thing from the other side: the building was only partly surveyed in 2011 and was judged not of sufficient architectural or historic interest to warrant a full survey. So nothing official dates the fabric, and the oldest thing anybody has dated here is nothing at all. The fabric has also had a violent interruption, which any claim to 1660 has to live with: a republican bomb attack in August 1975 partly demolished the building and killed Cecil Anderson, a works supervisor from Lambeg, who was 51. The pub also says Daniel O'Connell stopped here in the early nineteenth century, which is its story rather than a record. The reason this house is worth a page is what has happened since. Its owner, Martin Caldwell, applied in the spring of 2025 to clear the site; Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council validated the application in the first week of May as LA05/2025/0281/F, more than a hundred letters of objection followed, and the Department for Infrastructure called the scheme unacceptable as it stood for want of transport detail. The council's own monthly decision list records the outcome: permission granted on 13 January 2026 to demolish the existing structures and build two detached houses, one fewer than was asked for. Permission is not a demolition and it is not a closure. The house shut in January 2023 after eight years under the same owner, reopened in April 2024 and trades four days a week by the Irish News's account; OpenStreetMap's surveyor still had it as a pub on 30 April 2026; and the Food Standards Agency inspected the kitchen on 7 August 2026 and rated it two. CAMRA's entry, which is cited here for the address and the older name, was last surveyed in January 2015 and last updated in May 2023, when it recorded the licensees retiring and suspected the house might be closed — it is eleven years behind the building and should not be read for the trading. The pub's own domain, speckledhenlisburn.com, now answers with an unclaimed Squarespace placeholder, so the link here is its Facebook page.

What to look for inside

Trading four days a week since it reopened in April 2024
Permission granted on 13 January 2026 to demolish the building for two houses
On the historic buildings register as record only, under its older name

Visiting

The Speckled Hen is in Derriaghy, Northern Ireland, at 47 Derriaghy Road, Derriaghy, Lisburn BT28 3SH. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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