Hall adjacent to St Andrew's COI and 35 Church Rd, Rasharkin, Ballymena, BT44 8QY, Co. Antrim.

Hall adjacent to St Andrew's Church of Ireland and 35 Church Road, Rasharkin, Ballymena, County Antrim

A good local example of a simple rural church hall dating from the early 20th century, located on the edge of Rasharkin village. This single-storey rendered school building, architect unknown, is rectangular in plan with a pitched roof, a projecting gabled porch to the front, and a single-storey flat-roofed extension added to the rear in the mid-20th century. The building faces north-east onto Church Road.

The walls are finished in smooth render, ruled and lined with quoins at the corners. Window openings have concrete cills. The front elevation is symmetrical, featuring a projecting gabled porch in the centre with a centrally located gothic arch-headed doorway flanked by lancet windows, and a tall narrow square-headed window opening on each side wall of the porch. To either side of the porch are two tall square-headed window openings. Above the doorway on the porch is a recessed rectangular panel with no datestone. To the right-hand side of the roof is a plain chimney with slim plain concrete capping and single clay pot.

The rear elevation has three tall square-headed window openings to the left-hand side, with a large single-storey flat-roofed extension occupying the right-hand portion. The flat-roofed extension has plain smooth render, ruled and lined, with painted timber fascias and square window openings with painted timber single-glazed casements.

The side elevations feature lancet-style windows. The south-east side elevation consists of two lancet windows with leaded lights in stained glass with foliate patterns. The north-west side elevation consists of three lancet windows similar to those on the south-east side, with the central window slightly larger. All side windows are boarded on the outside. The lancet windows throughout have plain plaster surrounds with keystone motifs, while the front square-headed windows have plaster keystone motifs.

The eaves feature a painted timber fascia and soffit with decorative saw-tooth moulding on the bargeboards and a carved timber finial at the apex. The roof is covered with natural slate with roll-top red clay ridge tiles. Rainwater goods are of cast metal ogee profile with metal downpipes.

The hall sits on a narrow site at the roadside, set back slightly with a boundary wall, piers and small gate on Church Road. The walling and piers have render similar to the building with concrete copings and pyramidal caps on the piers. The gate is a replacement metal structure. The site is landscaped to the rear, where it slopes away gently to the south-west. The wall of St Andrew's Church graveyard, constructed of squared rock-faced stone, borders the site to the north-west. A modern two-storey house adjoins to the south-east.

The building has group value with St Andrew's Church of Ireland and graveyard, and is a prominent local landmark of local architectural and historic interest. However, it is not of sufficient special architectural and historic interest to merit listing.

Historic Development

Ordnance Survey maps of 1832–33, 1857, and 1903 record a 'School Ho[use]' or 'School' at this site, shown as two small square structures set at right-angles to each other. The main section of the current building appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1920, indicating construction sometime between 1903 and 1920. The building is recorded in successive valuation books as a 'Parochial School House', but being exempt from rates, no other details are given to date the present structure more precisely. An annotation in the valuation book covering the period 1910–29 reading simply '1916' may indicate the building dates to this year or slightly earlier. This is supported by documents in a later Northern Ireland Ministry of Finance file containing a 1913 application for the building of a new National School at Rasharkin. It remains unclear whether these documents refer to this particular building or another National School built around the same time further south along Church Road, which has since been demolished. The current structure appears older than 1913.

The building ceased to be used as a school at some point in the mid-20th century and is marked as a 'hall' on the 1974 Ordnance Survey map. The addition of the rear extension, whose detailing suggests it dates to the mid to later 1960s, likely coincided with this change of use. The building appears to have been vacated before 2008.