25 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, County Antrim, BT44 0AP

25 Toberwine Street is a plain, relatively low three-storey rendered terraced house of possible early to mid-19th century construction, situated on the west side of Toberwine Street in Glenarm. Its front façade was altered in recent years when a modern-style shop front was replaced with a more traditional domestic arrangement. The property is not considered to be of architectural interest.

The front façade is symmetrical. At the centre of the ground floor is a four-panel door with the upper two panels glazed. To its left is a sash window with Georgian panes in a six-over-six configuration, and to its right is a similar window, with three more matching windows to the first floor. At second-floor level there are three much smaller three-over-three sash windows. The façade is finished in painted lined render with chamfered quoins. On the left side of the exposed uppermost section of the north gable there is a small single-pane window, with a slightly larger six-pane Georgian window to its right.

To the rear of the property there are three extensions, all linked. The northernmost is flat-roofed and relatively low but appears to contain two storeys. On the left side of its west face is an upper-level modern window, with a smaller modern window set at a higher level to the right. Immediately to the south of this is a smaller but slightly taller extension, with an open doorway at ground-floor level on its west face leading through to the rear door proper, and a modern window at first-floor level. To the south side of the rear elevation is a large two-storey flat-roofed return. Its west face abuts a large former outbuilding, while its south face is blank, facing onto number 27. To the north face of this return there is a modern window to the right and a modern door to the left at ground-floor level, with two modern windows at first-floor level.

The former outbuilding block to the west abuts a similar block belonging to the neighbouring property to the north. On the east face of this block there is an open passageway running through the building. Immediately to the right (north) of this passageway, a single-storey shed with a mono-pitched roof projects outward, with a casement window and a sheeted door on its south face. Extending from the left side of the west façade of the former outbuilding block is a single-storey flat-roofed shed which abuts a glasshouse further to the west.

The rear façade of the main house is exposed only at much of the first- and second-floor levels, where a sash window matching those on the front first floor is set at an intermediate level. This section of the façade is finished in painted plain render. The rear extensions are finished in painted roughcast, while the west façade of the outbuilding block is largely unrendered. The main house has a gabled slated roof with two brick chimneystacks. The rear extensions all have flat roofs, with the outbuilding block having a gabled roof covered in artificial slate. The rainwater goods appear to be a mixture of cast iron and PVC.

Toberwine Street — whose name translates as "Street of the Sweet Well" — is thought to represent the original area of settlement within the village of Glenarm, its narrowness reflecting something of its antiquity. The original 13th-century castle of Glenarm, around which the village developed, is believed to have stood at the south-west corner of the street, on the site now occupied by the former courthouse. The castle was deliberately destroyed by Sorley Boy MacDonnell in 1597 and apparently not repaired; his descendant Sir Randal McDonnell instead built a new residence on the other side of the river. Some historians record that the old castle was occupied by tenants — and therefore presumably repaired in some form — in the later 17th century, though Richard Dobbs makes no reference to it in his 1683 description of the village. The first mention of "Toberwine" in the Antrim Papers appears in a lease of November 1672 referring to a house in the area, with "Toberwine Street" itself named in a lease of August 1709. On John O'Hara's 1779 map of Glenarm — the earliest surviving plan of the village — the street is shown fully developed on both sides, with the market and courthouse at the south-west end. There is no verifiable indication of any remains of the old castle on that map, but a remark in the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs concerning "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago" suggests that some ruins may have survived into the early 19th century.

Evidence from the 1833 valuation indicates that most of the buildings currently visible on the west side of the street were present in some form at that date and were probably of 18th-century origin. The east side of the street saw considerably more development after 1833, with numbers 4 to 12 dating from around 1840, and numbers 20 to 34 and 62 from after around 1860, some of the latter replacing modest single-storey dwellings.

The site of number 25 is shown as occupied on John O'Hara's 1779 map and on all subsequent maps. The 1833 valuation records an old two-storey house on the site, occupied by a Daniel McAuley. By 1859 a Matthew Wilson was in residence, and the height of the building had increased from 17½ feet to 22 feet in the interim, suggesting the property was either entirely rebuilt or had its wall height raised. Given the low overall proportions of the building — and of the uppermost floor in particular — it is considered more likely that the wall height was raised, as appears to have occurred at several other properties in Toberwine Street during the mid-19th century, though this is not certain. In more recent times the property contained a shop, but reverted to solely domestic use in the 1980s.