First Dunboe Presbyterian Church, Articlave, Castlerock, Co. Londonderry, BT51

First Dunboe Presbyterian Church is a freestanding early 20th-century Presbyterian church built in 1935–6 to designs by architect James Sherriff Kennedy of Coleraine, situated on the north side of St Pauls Road in the village of Articlave. The church was extensively refurbished in 1994 and was listed in 1990. The listing extends to the church itself, the gate screens, and the surrounding walling.

The building is well-proportioned and detailed in a style associated with 19th-century church architecture, but constructed using modern materials consistent with 1930s design. Architectural writers have described it variously as in a "very bleak gothic idiom" (Girvan) and as "cruciform last-gasp Gothic with brick quoins and a vaguely Dutch air" (Rowan). Its eclectic character is considered a point of interest, and the church makes an important contribution to the architectural variety and character of the surrounding area, as well as being of significant social importance and local interest.

The plan is rectangular with a projecting porch to the ecclesiastical south, transepts to the ecclesiastical east and west, and a chancel to the ecclesiastical north. The chancel is abutted to the east by a presbytery and to the west by a vestry, both of which incorporate a full-length basement beneath the chancel. The roof is pitched natural slate with angled terracotta ridge tiles, sandstone verges, and kneelers to the gables. Rainwater goods are cast-iron ogee gutters with square downpipes and cast-iron hoppers.

The walling is pebbledash over concrete block construction, set on a stretcher-bonded red-brick plinth with a chamfered sandstone coping. Red-brick dressings include an eaves band, and sandstone ashlar platbands are provided to the gables. Windows throughout are a variety of leaded glass lancets dating from both the early and late parts of the 20th century, set in block sandstone surrounds with chamfered sills unless otherwise noted.

The south-facing entrance gable has a projecting gabled porch. A carved datestone reading "1936" is set to the apex, above a diminutive bipartite mullioned square-headed rectangular window, with a group of three lancets to the gallery below. Tripartite mullioned windows in a shared square-headed surround with spandrel panels flank the central porch to either side. The porch itself has diagonal buttresses with sandstone caps, raised sandstone verges with kneelers, a sandstone platband, and a mid-level red-brick string-course to the gable. The entrance comprises an original pointed-headed timber-sheeted door with ornate cast-iron strap-hinges, set within an ashlar sandstone chamfered reveal.

A two-stage square tower stands to the left of the entrance gable. It has angle buttresses rising to a concave parapet and a pyramidal Westmoreland slate roof topped by a weathervane. The second stage features stylised mock machicolations above a Y-tracery lancet window with a hood mould. The first stage has a square-headed bipartite mullioned window over a square-headed four-paned mullioned window, with a rectangular segmental-headed window to the ground floor of the south face only.

The west elevation has four evenly-spaced lancets divided by buttresses. It is abutted to the left by the west transept, which has two tall lancets to the gable and a lancet to the south cheek. The east elevation is detailed in the same manner as the west.

The north gable is abutted by a lower apsidal chancel, with a gabled presbytery to the left cheek and a gabled vestry to the right cheek, all set over a smooth rendered basement level. The gable itself has a bipartite mullioned window to the apex with a sandstone string-course, and is flanked by chimneystacks at mid-level. The apsidal chancel has three lancets, and at basement level there are windows flanking a modern timber door. The presbytery has a square-headed tripartite mullioned window to the right and a window to the left over a modern timber door, along with three square-headed windows; its gable has a bipartite mullioned window and a modern timber door to the left, accessed via concrete steps with a modern handrail. The vestry is identical in arrangement to the presbytery.

Most of the stained glass is by Clokey of Belfast.

The church is set on a large plot set back from the main A2 road in the centre of the village, surrounded largely by late 20th-century housing developments. It faces the church hall, known as the Mark Memorial Hall. To the east is a graveyard containing headstones dating from the mid-19th century to the present day. The front of the site is lawned with a turning circle. The site is bounded by a mid-height pebbledash wall with a smooth base and sandstone coping. To the front are alcoved entrance walls with corner piers and gate piers having tall sandstone pyramidal caps; the taller gate piers support original cast-iron gates. Similar gate piers also provide access to the graveyard.

The congregation at First Dunboe is thought to date back to the mid-17th century, when the Reverend Thomas Fulton and then the Reverend James Blair were appointed ministers. Details of the earliest meeting house in the area are not known, but in 1785 a new meeting house was built, which was raised in height in 1830 to accommodate a gallery around three sides. This building is recorded in the Townland and Griffith's Valuations at £9 and £21 respectively, and was still present on the site at the time of the First General Revaluation in the early 1930s. Records at that time give further details of its size and construction, including plans of ancillary outbuildings — now gone — that were used as stabling by the congregation.

The village of Articlave has been a settled community since it was founded in the early 17th century by the Clothworkers' Guild, remaining for centuries a compact settlement that has only recently grown with new residential estates appearing on all sides. The congregation has a notable history of emigration. In 1718, the Reverend James Woodside led 160 people from the church in a pioneering wave of Ulster Scots emigration aboard the vessel McCallum to Boston, the emigrants later settling in Merrymeeting Bay in Brunswick, Maine. A group of emigrants from First Dunboe who left in the mid-19th century, perhaps fleeing famine and disease, are known to have founded a church in Pennsylvania called the Mauch Chunk Presbyterian Church. In 1861, a further emigrant, John Thompson from Articlave, wrote the only known eyewitness account of the start of the American Civil War, sent in a letter home to his father.

The Reverend John Mark (1867–1906) was a supporter of the tenant right movement, and the church hall facing the building was built in his memory and opened in 1908. When serious structural defects were discovered during repairs to the old church in the mid-1920s, the decision was taken to erect an entirely new building on an adjacent site to the north-west of the earlier meeting house. The minister, the Reverend James Mark, raised £3,000 in the United States, and two former members of the congregation — John and David Crawford of Parkersburg, USA — made significant donations, enabling the building debt to be cleared.

The new church was built in 1935–6 to designs by James Sherriff Kennedy, with J W Crawford acting as contractor and the total cost coming to £7,300. Kennedy was active from approximately 1907 to 1938 and had been a pupil of F H Tulloch in Belfast, going on to serve as engineer to the Limavady Board of Guardians and Limavady Rural District Council until 1937. His output was largely domestic in character, and the Articlave church appears to have been his only ecclesiastical commission. Girvan suggests the design may owe something to Vincent Craig's work at Portstewart and Ballywatt, and commends the "good modest light oak pews and chancel furniture." The current congregation numbers around 336 families, some of whom can trace their roots in the area back several centuries.