Duneane Presbyterian Church, Gloverstown Road, Toomebridge, Co. Antrim, BT41 3RB

Duneane Presbyterian Church is a striking detached double-height modernist Presbyterian church, erected in 1936 according to its datestone, and designed by the architect John McGeagh. It stands on the north side of Gloverstown Road at a crossroads, set within a graveyard, and represents a confident departure from traditional rural church architecture in its assured and elegant handling of modernist design.

The building has a rectangular nave with windows contained within a single projecting bay to each side elevation, a three-stage belfry tower and a single-storey projecting porch to the south-east corner, and single-storey flat-roofed vestry wings clasping the west gable corners. These vestry wings are accessed from a brick platform spanning the full width of the gable, itself reached by steps at either end. The roof is pitched, covered in green-grey slate, with catsliding over the projecting bays, overhanging eaves on exposed rafter tails, and raised verges with masonry coping. The walling throughout is brown brick laid in English garden wall bond over a deep ashlar sandstone plinth with a bevelled edge. Rainwater goods are half-round cast metal.

Windows are generally round-headed with leaded coloured glazing, flush sandstone reveals, brick voussoirs and chamfered cills. The south elevation is four windows wide, each flanked by deeply projecting two-stage buttresses with profiled and tumbled brickwork offsets. Honeycombed clay tile ventilation panels are set to the aprons of the outer windows. The exposed section of the south elevation above the vestry block at the west end has a group of three windows with chamfered brick reveals.

The east gable features a paired window opening divided by a half-engaged ashlar sandstone colonnette with an Art Deco style capital, all contained within a sandstone reveal. The window heads break into a semi-circular panel carved in relief, depicting a stylised human figure flanked by prone African springboks. These panels are of considerable artistic merit — unusual and intricately detailed — and the springboks refer directly to the church's patron, James Kerr Fulton of Johannesburg, South Africa. A foundation stone with inscription is set below the opening.

The north elevation is detailed in the same manner as the south, but with a tall chimneystack abutting the left cheek of the projecting bay. The west gable has a diminished gabled projection with a raking brick cornice detailed with protruding bricks forming the shape of an elongated cross, flanked by the vestry wings. A cross formed from recessed bricks sits at the main apex.

The vestry wings are identical to one another. Each has a symmetrical west elevation with a central timber sheeted door flanked by square-headed windows with gauged brick cills and reveals. Each side elevation has a group of four windows detailed as elsewhere. Each side plinth contains a group of four square-headed openings at ground level beneath a single projecting stone lintel.

The belfry abuts the right cheek of the projecting bay, with each stage inset slightly from the one below. It has a pitched roof and a round-headed louvred opening to the east and west elevations at the third stage. The porch is asymmetrical with a pitched roof catsliding to the west to abut the belfry. The entrance is a four-order Romanesque style door opening inset with colonnettes of gauged brick and surmounted by a relief panel depicting twin doves and grapes. The timber door is double-leafed, each leaf having seven panels arranged vertically. The east elevation of the porch has three grouped square-headed windows detailed as those of the vestry.

The well-preserved interior displays the same attention to detail evident on the exterior, with doors and the pulpit exhibiting a strong linear emphasis. The potential of brick as both a decorative and constructional material is fully exploited throughout, and the finishes demonstrate a high quality of craftsmanship.

The church is set within a graveyard bounded to the road by a brick boundary wall and accessed through an alcoved entrance screen with saddleback stone coping. The square gate piers have horizontally banded caps, and the gates are gridwork cast iron.

John McGeagh was the architect of other buildings in a similar modernist style, most notably the Sir William Whitla Hall at Queen's University Belfast, designed contemporaneously with Duneane Church in 1936 and displaying similar design characteristics and materials. McGeagh also contributed to St Anne's Cathedral in Belfast. The patron of the 1936 church was James Kerr Fulton of Johannesburg, South Africa, who had run a successful mining business there and wished to erect a new church in a modern style in memory of his parents, John and Sarah Fulton.

The site has a much longer history of Presbyterian worship. Historical research indicates that a previous Presbyterian meeting house once stood here. The former 19th-century church building, which stands directly to the north of the current church and is now used as a hall, was built in 1815 during the ministry of the Reverend Archabald when the congregation numbered 250 families, and could accommodate 360 people. An earlier church on the site had originally been built of mud and was subsequently rebuilt in stone. The Ordnance Survey Memoir of 1837 describes the earlier church in some detail: its floor was of earth except in two double pews which were boarded; the aisle was six and a half feet wide; there were ten oval-shaped windows, four on each side and one at each end, each three feet wide; and there were two doors on the side or front of the meeting house. The original church stood within one acre of land, valued at £6 1s 0d in 1836, and the graveyard was extended by 1857.

The graveyard contains various 19th-century memorials, including the Carey Memorial, commemorating prominent local figure John Carey, with whose memory the church is further associated. Standing at a crossroads, the church forms a prominent group together with the former 19th-century hall and the graveyard with its gate screen and boundary wall.