1st Limavady Presbyterian Church, Church Street, Limavady, Co Londonderry, BT49 OBX

A mid-Victorian neo-Gothic church in basalt, faced and trimmed with ashlar sandstone, whose character and setting have been degraded by modern extensions.

The building is a hall church with shallow projecting porch and shallow transepts on either side, giving the impression of a cruciform layout, though the arrangement is reversed. The three-bay-wide entrance front is framed by clasping sandstone buttresses which terminate in gables with pointed finials, each crowned with a crochet. The round-headed entrance door is emphasised with narrow buttresses on either side and an ogee label moulding that cuts through a short string course. Above the door is a wide round-headed window, and above that, in the steep sloping gable, sits a sandstone lozenge. This gable treatment is matched by those in the narrow transepts. Tall narrow round-headed lancets flank the projecting porch, which is trimmed with sandstone in a Gibbsian manner and projects just far enough to accommodate narrow and very slender lancets. The transept gables contain single lancets with a small one in each gable. The main hall is lit by four round-headed lancets on each side, while the transepts are punctuated with short shouldered sandstone diagonal buttresses. Sandstone is used for all bargestones, kneelers and quoins. The roof is slated in Welsh blues.

The congregation was established in 1650, initially meeting in a thatched building. A replacement was erected around 1773, and by the 1820s occupied a T-shaped meeting house. That structure, which measured 73 feet by 23 feet in its transverse arm and 38 feet by 21 feet in its upright arm, was demolished in 1856–57 and replaced by the present church, erected at right angles to its predecessor. The new building cost £1,200; the minister, Mr Wilson (1828–60), contributed £200, and Mr McCausland of Drenagh supplied stone free of charge. The church plan is remarkably similar to those at Hollymount, County Down and Dunluce, and was prepared by Charles Lanyon for the Down and Connor Church Accommodation Society. An organ was installed around the 1930s, and a new heating system in 1955. The church suffered bomb damage in 1981. The graveyard contains a headstone recording seven infant children who died in 1865, whose parents were Elizabeth and George Given; George Given died 1 October 1893, aged 69 years, and may have been the architect George Given involved in St Mary's Church on Irish Green Street. The manse, Roe Vista, Killane Road, was erected in 1906.

The building is sited in the angle formed by Church Street and Scroggy Road, with the building line set well back from the roadways. Around two sides of the complex lies a graveyard. A new hall was erected in the 1980s in post-modern style facing Scroggy Road, and between it and the church, projecting forward of the main building line, stands an octagonal minister's room built in basalt and finished with a white-painted plastered parapet behind which sits a slated pyramidal roof. The remaining two sides are paved in bituminous macadam.