Post Office, 67 Main Street, Bushmills, Co.Antrim

This is a two-storey, three-bay, pebble-dashed end-of-terrace building, constructed prior to 1834 as part of the extensive rebuilding of Bushmills carried out by the MacNaghten family of Bushmills House from the 1820s onwards. The MacNaghtens had acquired the estate in 1787, and their programme of reconstruction transformed what had already been a significant settlement before the end of the 18th century. The building is Grade B2 listed and sits within the Bushmills Conservation Area, designated in 1992 to protect the built heritage of a village that contains the highest number of listed buildings in the north-east of Northern Ireland.

The building occupies a corner site on the west side of Main Street, with its gable wall facing onto Market Square. The Main Street runs parallel with the Bush River to the west. The plan is rectangular, with a two-storey rendered extension to the south-west side and two stone outbuildings to the rear. The roof is finished in fibre cement with unpainted rendered chimney stacks to the south-east and north-west; the north-west gable chimney stack is topped by two circular terracotta clay pots.

The principal elevation faces north-east and is accessed directly from the pavement on Main Street. It is three bays wide. At ground floor level, two bays flank a central entrance doorway, with the ground floor bays aligning with the narrower bays on the floor above. The entrance doorway contains a replacement painted timber door with a glazed top pane and a plain glazed transom light over. The first floor has timber sliding sash windows, with the left-hand bay containing a paired timber sliding sash. Plaster band surrounds frame each first-floor opening. Cast-iron rainwater goods serve the front elevation. The south-east gable is adjoined to the neighbouring property at No. 69 Main Street.

The north-west elevation faces Market Square. At ground floor level there is a large window opening to the left and a single window bay to the right. A high roughcast rendered wall extends westward to the corner of the site, abutting the east side of No. 65. This wall contains two doorways: the left-hand opening has a three-panel painted timber door with a glazed transom light over and metal door furniture; the right-hand opening contains a painted flush door set within a plain architrave surround.

The south-west elevation to the rear faces into a large enclosed yard surrounded by a high stone and red brick wall. The main rear elevation is abutted on the right by a two-storey pebble-dashed flat-roofed extension. The main rear wall is pebble-dashed and has a single ground-floor entrance doorway containing a flush timber door. At first floor, directly above, there is a single entrance opening with a uPVC door, accessed by a set of external timber steps from within the rear yard. The flat-roofed extension has a timber casement window with opaque glazing at both ground and first floor levels.

The two outbuildings to the rear are constructed in a mixture of stone and red brick with rendered sections. Their door openings contain painted flush timber doors, all windows are timber casements, and both have lean-to corrugated metal roofs.

The building was first recorded on the Townland Valuation Town Plan of around 1834, which shows it as a terraced structure with several small outbuildings to the rear. The Townland Valuations of 1835 classified it as a 1A-class structure — that is, new or nearly new — measuring 28.6 feet by 28 feet and standing 19 feet in height, with an initial rateable value of £7 14 shillings. By the time of Griffith's Valuation in 1859, the building had been divided into two separate dwellings, both leased to tenants by the Reverend William Oliver, minister at the local Presbyterian Meeting House, who himself resided at the adjoining No. 69 Main Street. The value had risen slightly to £7 15 shillings at that point. The two dwellings were reunited as a single property around 1863, when the Reverend Oliver leased the building to Douglas McMullen, a local haberdasher who operated his shop from the premises, and the value rose to £8.

Occupants changed frequently over the following four decades. By the turn of the 20th century the building was occupied by Margaret McNeill, a local grocer. The 1911 Census of Ireland described it as a second-class dwelling and grocer's shop consisting of seven rooms, with extensive out-offices including a stable, coach house, two cow houses, a piggery, boiling house, and a store. The Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1902 depicted the building as an L-shaped corner-site structure with a number of small outbuildings to the rear, now replaced. The value was raised to £26 under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57), by which time the McNeill family had purchased the site outright. The McNeills vacated the building around 1948, after which it passed through several different owners. A Mr Henry Morton was recorded as owner from around 1970, and by the close of the Second General Revaluation (1956–72) the total rateable value stood at £45.

The building was listed in 1980. In 1972, the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society's guide to North Antrim described the buildings along Main Street in Bushmills in the following terms: "A well-scaled street. Many good doorways and shopfronts remain, although there is the usual profusion of signs. While no building apart from the former Courthouse is worthy of individual mention, the unity of the street frontages must be maintained."

Despite the presence of large modern signage on the Market Square gable wall, artificial slate to the roof, and the flat-roofed extension at the rear, the building retains its original historic proportions and character to the front facade within its terraced village-centre setting. The terrace row has views northward towards Market Square, and the setting contributes to the building's group value alongside the wider Main Street frontage.