Culfeightrin Church, Ballynaglagh Tl, Co.Antrim

Culfeightrin Parish Church is a free-standing, double-height Gothic Revival Church of Ireland building constructed in 1830–31 from locally quarried basalt. It stands on an elevated site on the north side of the Cushendall Road in the townland of Ballynaglogh, County Antrim, and has served continuously as a place of worship from its construction to the present day. The listing extends to both the church and its gate screen.

The building is rectangular in plan, oriented approximately west to east, and of simple gabled form. A gabled entrance porch projects from the west gable, and a gabled chancel projects from the east gable, with a small vestry tucked into the north-east re-entrant angle. The roof is finished in natural slate with roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles, set behind slightly raised gables with saddleback sandstone coping. Replacement metal guttering is carried on iron brackets, and replacement steel downpipes are fitted.

The walling is of random-coursed, rough-hewn squared basalt with tooled squared sandstone quoins and a sandstone plinth course, all lime-pointed. The window openings are lancets throughout the nave, with projecting sandstone ashlar surrounds, splayed flush sills, and metal-framed leaded windows with coloured glazed panels and storm glazing.

The west front is the principal elevation. The gable is surmounted by a sandstone bell-cote carrying an iron bell and is flanked by full-height octagonal sandstone ashlar piers topped with tapered pinnacles. Tall, slender full-height lancets flank the lower projecting entrance porch. The porch itself has a single lancet to its west face and a pointed-arched door opening in its south cheek, with a stop-chamfered sandstone ashlar surround and a deep-set pointed-arched opening containing the original pine door. This door has nine stop-chamfered flat panels and a leaded glazed overlight. A recent single-storey gabled extension, also constructed in basalt, has been added to the north face of the entrance porch, and a modern lean-to abuts the building at the opposite end of the north elevation. The north nave elevation is two windows wide with roughcast rendered walling.

At the east end, the central gabled chancel projection has a Tudor-arched east window with a chamfered sandstone surround and triple-light stone tracery with leaded and coloured glazing. The lower gabled vestry in the north-east angle retains an early paired lancet window with iron latticed glazing. A modern lean-to abuts the opposite side of the chancel. The south nave elevation is two bays wide.

The 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs described the church as "a well-finished building. The windows are Gothic and have cutstone mouldings and there is a handsome little cutstone spire over the doorway." Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) called it "a neat edifice in the later English style" and recorded that it was built with the aid of a £600 loan from the Board of First Fruits, on the site of the medieval Parish Church of Culfeightrin. The architect is unknown, though the Natural Stone Database records that locally quarried basalt was used as the principal material alongside Ballycastle sandstone. The church was first recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1832 in its current layout. The Townland Valuation of around 1834 valued the church at £7 12 shillings, exempt from taxation. By the time of Griffith's Valuation of around 1859, the value had risen to £10, and the land was noted as leased from a Mr John McGilloway. The church appears to have remained remarkably unaltered since construction. The First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57) raised its value to £30, which was subsequently reduced to £24 by the end of the Second General Revaluation (1956–72). The 1972 Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide described it as "a very simple stone belfried building, with extremely tall, slim, narrow lancet windows, and two needle-sharp pinnacles at the west end; porch somewhat late; the architraves in a softer yellowish sandstone, now much weathered." The church was listed in 1980.

The church sits prominently within a walled graveyard and is accessed via a winding gravel driveway from the Cushendall Road, entered through a pair of wrought-iron gates hung on square-plan stone piers with pyramidal capstones. Within the graveyard stands a scheduled monument (ANT 009:008), comprising three ancient basalt standing stones — two upright and one repurposed as a grave marker — together with Bronze Age cists. These prehistoric remains, alongside the medieval and post-medieval religious history of the site, make this an important location in the religious and cultural traditions of the local community.