19 Altmore Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AR

A plain, two-storey stucco terraced house of probable pre-1832 construction, possibly dating from the 1820s to 1830s, situated on the west side of Altmore Street, Glenarm. It forms part of a historic streetscape and sits within a conservation area. The building retains sufficient period detail, both internally and externally, to merit statutory protection, despite some later alterations including modern window frames to the rear and an asbestos slate roof covering.

EXTERIOR

The asymmetrical front façade faces east. On the ground floor, to the far right, is a panelled timber door with a rectangular fanlight. To its left are two windows with Georgian-paned sash frames in a six-over-six arrangement; these frames have relatively thick boxes and no horns, indicating their early date. To the far left is a timber-sheeted door leading into a passage. The first floor has four windows matching those below, with the openings aligned vertically with the ground floor. The front façade is finished in painted lined render with a base course and sill courses, and has widely spaced quoins to the right (north) side.

To the rear, the left half of the elevation is taken up by a large two-storey gabled return. On the gable of the return, there is an enlarged window with a modern frame at ground floor level and a smaller window with a modern frame above. On the south face of the return at ground floor level there is a doorway with a modern door and two windows with modern frames; the first floor has a similar window. On the rear façade of the main section of the house, the ground floor has a window with a modern frame to the left and the passage to the right; the first floor has two windows of differing sizes, both with modern frames. The entire rear elevation is finished in unpainted roughcast render.

The gabled roof is covered in asbestos slates, with a small skylight to the rear. There are two rendered chimneystacks on the roof of the main section; the southern stack is not positioned at the extreme southern edge of the property. The return roof also has a chimneystack and a small skylight to the north side. Rainwater goods are a mixture of cast iron and PVC.

STREET AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Altmore Street takes its name from the Altmore River, a narrow brook flowing from high ground to the south-east down to the Glenarm River to the west. The earliest documentary references to building plots in its vicinity date from a lease of August 1673 mentioning a "housestead, garden of tenement…extending back to Altmore Brook", with further leases of December 1678 referring to "tenements" on the "south side of Altmore" and the presence of a "street". Many of the earliest houses may have been built on the western side of the street. Before the walling in of estate grounds near Glenarm Castle in the 1750s, the village fronted onto both sides of the Glenarm River, and some buildings on the western side of Altmore Street may originally have faced the river rather than the street. The present No. 15, for instance, appears originally to have had an almost symmetrical rear elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical front elevation, while No. 29 has a 1739 date stone on its river-facing side rather than its street-facing front.

The earliest surviving map of Glenarm, drawn up by John O'Hara in 1779, shows the street fully developed on both sides, with the western terrace extending further south than today, beyond the line of the present Town Gate to the Glenarm Castle estate. The construction of the Town Gate sometime between 1832 and 1857 appears to have led to radical changes in the layout of the street, with much of the eastern terrace pushed further eastward to allow for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No account of this widening has been found in published histories of Glenarm, but the discrepancy between the alignment of the eastern terrace as shown on the 1832 Ordnance Survey map and the 1857 map strongly suggests it took place. This is further supported by an 1830 illustration of the town which shows the two sections of the eastern terrace out of alignment, and by the fact that many of the buildings recorded in the 1833 valuation of the eastern side of the street appear to bear no relation to those recorded in 1859, as if all had been demolished. The age and condition grading used in the 1859 valuation suggests that most of the rebuilt dwellings on that side were approximately twenty years old at the time, placing much of the redevelopment in the mid to late 1830s. This corresponds with a remark in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1835 that "some two storey houses of a tolerable description have been recently built in Glenarm…intended for the accommodation of lodgers during the bathing season." The western side of Altmore Street may have remained largely untouched by these mid-19th-century changes, with some of the buildings visible today possibly pre-dating the 1830s, though properties at the very southern end were cleared to make way for the Town Gate and incorporated into the castle estate.

NO. 19 SPECIFICALLY

The site of No. 19 is shown as occupied on O'Hara's map of 1779, with the plot recorded as leased to one Alexander Sayers. It also appears on the 1832 Ordnance Survey map. The present house is probably the same building recorded in the 1859 valuation notebook as having "2 rooms below, 3 rooms above and garret", with a "kitchen room off and 2 over" in the return. At that time the property was in the ownership of a Stewart Dunne but leased by a Margaret Stewart, and was considered by the valuers to be at least twenty years old, receiving a condition grade of "B".