35-37 Castle Street, Ballycastle, County Antrim, BT54 6AS

35–37 Castle Street is a plain two-storey terrace block containing two houses, built in 1877–78, with a flat-roofed two-storey rear extension added in 1907. The block sits on the south side of Castle Street, to the west of Ballycastle town centre, and falls within a conservation area.

The asymmetrical north-facing front elevation is finished in painted render. To the left of centre is a flat-arch doorway (to No.37) with a moulded surround and a timber door whose glazed panel has been boarded over. To its right is a similar doorway whose opening has also been boarded up. Further right is a roughly square flat-arch window opening with a modern timber frame, which appears to have been altered at some point. To the far left is a segmental-arched carriage entrance with timber double doors. At first-floor level there are four unevenly spaced flat-arch windows with moulded surrounds: the two to the left retain timber sash frames with horns and plate glass, while the two to the right have modern timber frames. A projecting street lamp has been added recently to the first floor, between the second and third windows.

To the rear, to the left (west) of the carriage arch, is a large L-plan two-storey flat-roofed extension. Not all of this extension could be inspected, but a small boarded-over window is visible to the right on the ground floor of the south face, and a large window opening is present on each floor of the east face — the ground-floor opening is boarded up, while the first-floor opening has a modern timber frame. At the rear of the main building, behind the carriage arch, there is a window at first-floor level with a modern timber frame, and a window opening at ground-floor level within the archway itself, though the frame of this last window could not be seen clearly. The main section of the rear is finished in dry dash render, while the walls within the carriage archway are whitewashed rubble, and the extension is finished in painted render.

The main roof is gabled, with a relatively high pitch and a covering of artificial slate. The extension roof appears to be covered in asphalt. There is a small rendered ridge chimneystack to the right of centre on the main roof, and a taller rendered chimneystack on the south side of the extension roof. Rainwater goods are a mixture of cast iron and PVCu.

The site has a well-documented history. The first valuation of January 1835 records an earlier house here — probably of mid-18th-century date — occupied by a Daniel McLean and measuring 32 by 23½ feet, 12 feet high, with a thatched outbuilding to the rear measuring 20 by 17 feet and only 5½ feet high. The property was exempt from rating, suggesting it was in poor condition. By 1859 the house had passed to a Michael Higgins, who leased it directly from the Boyd estate. The valuers at that point describe it as a "low house in very bad repair" containing "eight small rooms". By 1878 the valuation revision book records two separate dwellings on the site, indicating that the present buildings were either constructed new or the old structure was radically remodelled and extended at around that time. Whether the earlier fabric was entirely replaced is not certain: the valuers typically used the phrase "house down" when a building had been completely demolished, and they did not do so here, yet the current form of the building and its division into two properties strongly suggests a rebuild. The two tenants listed in 1878 were the leaseholder Michael Higgins in the western house (present No.35) and John McAuley in present No.37.

No.37 subsequently passed through a rapid succession of tenants — John McGrath, William Glass, and John Higgins — before Charles McKay took it in 1884. Michael Higgins continued to occupy No.35 until 1885, after which it too changed hands frequently: William and John Harman (to 1891), John Mitchell (1891–95), John McGuckin (1895–96), Daniel Grant (1896–97), and Jane McCormick (1897–98).

In 1898 the valuers record the appearance of a new and presumably freestanding house to the rear, measuring 16 by 20 feet and 9 feet high, built of rubble masonry with an iron — almost certainly corrugated iron — roof. The leaseholder Michael Higgins lived in this rear dwelling for a year before moving to No.37 the following year. At that same point, a Robert Colgan took the lease of No.37 and a Charles Kane took that of No.35; Colgan had also become tenant of No.35 by this date, and his family remained there until 1935. No.37 again saw rapid turnover: Anne McKinley (1901–02), Samuel Douthard (1902–03), Hugh Mitchell (1903–05), Henry Kane (1905–07), and then the leaseholder Charles Kane himself as resident between 1907 and 1925. It was Charles Kane who added the 1907 extension and carried out alterations to No.37 that year. The extension appears to have been flat-roofed from the outset: the valuers specifically record it as being covered in Vulcanite. The small rear house was vacant from around 1900 to 1905, then occupied by a William Chestnutt, before becoming vacant again in 1912 and disappearing from the valuations altogether two years later.

In 1925 the leases of both No.35 and No.37 were acquired by, or passed to, the Ramoan Parish Church Committee, who retained them until 1958, when they were acquired by William Smyth, who was still holding them in 1972. After the Colgan family left No.35 in 1935, the Watson family occupied it, with members of the same family also resident in No.37 from 1940 to 1956. No.35 is recorded as vacant between 1963 and 1972, while a Robert Anderson occupied No.37 from around 1957 until at least 1972. Both properties were sold in mid-2004, and at the time of the survey in October 2004 both were vacant.