2 Old Coastguard Cottages, North Street, Ballycastle, Co Antrim, BT54 6BZ

This is one of a terrace of houses forming part of a former coastguard station of mid-Victorian date, designed by an important Irish architectural office. Despite exterior alterations and changes to its setting, the building retains considerable architectural and historical interest, particularly for its group value with the other former coastguard houses on the site.

The complex comprises a two-storey terrace consisting of a former cottage for the commanding officer and six cottages for ranks, with an off-centre tower and small outhouses separated by an entrance street. Opposite each unit stands a small enclosed yard with a lean-to roofed store. The terrace is reached by a laneway from North Street and stands freestanding within its grounds, though these have been considerably diminished by later development. The cottages have slated roofs with hips; the tower has a flat roof with a high parapet wall.

Number 2 is two bays wide. The front elevation features an entrance door sheeted with a small glazed panel and rectangular plain fanlight, approached by two steps. A small window to the left of the door lights a cloakroom behind. To the right is a double hung sliding sash window with 12 panes. At first floor level, a similar window of lesser height sits directly above. The door and windows are set within sandstone blockbonded into the wall, finished with roughcast rendering painted white. Metal gutter and round downpipe serve a slated roof; the chimney stacks are grey and yellow with back moulding.

The rear or south-east elevation features a sheeted door with a shallow fanlight divided in three, coupled with a double hung sliding sash 12-pane window, accessed by four steps. At first floor level, centred above the door and window below, is a two-light double hung sliding sash 8-pane window. The wall is finished with roughcast painted white, with door and window trimmed in sandstone. A plinth and corbel eave course with gutter and single downpipe complete this elevation, which supports a slated roof. The basement area of Number 1 overlaps on this façade.

Across the street lies a semi-circular small paved yard with a lean-to corridor containing a heating chamber with metal flue. Photographs by W.A. Green dating to around 1900 show the south-east elevation of the terrace was considerably different in its original form, displaying a single window at ground floor level to each of the smaller cottages and two-light coupled windows at first floor level.

The coastguard station was erected in 1868, originally comprising five houses and a tower, probably designed by Edward Talbot Owen, assistant architect in the Irish Board of Public Works in Dublin, under the direction of the board's principal architect, his brother J.H. Owen. Edward Talbot Owen appears to have assumed responsibility for designing coastguard stations from J.H. Owen in the mid-1860s. The station was vacated by the coastguard around the 1960s, after which the buildings reverted to the Trustees of the Fullerton Estate.

The coastguard station appears for the first time on the Ordnance Survey map of 1904. Prior to that date, the Ordnance Survey map of 1855 shows a coastguard station at a position nearer to the sea, adjacent to the pier, whose officers' residences were described in the 1830s as having "nothing in their architecture or appearance worthy of description". The building is of industrial archaeological interest.