40 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AP

40 Toberwine Street is a small, plain, two-storey terraced house built around 1870, forming one of a mirrored (handed) pair with its neighbour No. 42. It sits on the east side of Toberwine Street in the village of Glenarm, County Antrim, within a conservation area, and is in private ownership. The property was assessed for listing but does not meet the criteria, being considered of neither sufficient architectural nor historic interest. It was delisted on 31 March 2005.

The front elevation faces roughly west and is asymmetrical. On the ground floor, to the left, is a timber-panelled door with a plain two-pane rectangular fanlight above it. To the right is a sash window with Georgian-style panes in a 6-over-6 configuration, and there are two further sash windows of the same type on the first floor. The front façade is finished in relatively recent lined render, with plain quoins to the left (south) side. The gabled roof is slated and has a small Velux window to the front and another to the rear. There is a brick chimney stack to the south. Rainwater goods are a mix of cast iron and PVC.

To the rear, on the left side of the east elevation, is a single-storey gabled kitchen extension, which appears to date from a renovation carried out in the 1990s. The east-facing gable of this extension is abutted by a small gabled outhouse. The south face of the extension forms the side wall of the rear yard of No. 42 and is blank. The north face has a modern window to the right and a slightly recessed glazed door to the left, set back so as not to overlap with the living room window. To the right of the extension, on the rear face of the main building, there is a window with a modern frame. There is a further similar window at half-landing level to the right, and another at first-floor level to the left. The rear elevation is finished in the same render as the front. The roof covering of the extension could not be seen at the time of assessment.

The property was completely renovated in the 1990s, at which point the rear extension appears to have been added and modern window frames installed to the rear.

Toberwine Street, whose name translates from the Irish as "Street of the Sweet Well," is thought to represent the original area of settlement within Glenarm. Its narrowness is itself suggestive of considerable 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 thereafter, with his descendant Sir Randal McDonnell building a new residence on the opposite side of the river. Some historians suggest the old castle was occupied by tenants in the later 17th century and was therefore repaired to some degree, but Richard Dobbs makes no reference to it in his 1683 description of the village. The first mention of "Toberwine" in the Antrim Papers occurs in a lease of November 1672, referring to a house within 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. No verifiable trace of the old castle is shown on this map, though the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs record "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago," suggesting that some ruins may have survived into the early 19th century.

Evidence from the 1833 valuation indicates that most of the buildings now 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, however, saw considerably more development after 1833: Nos. 4–12 date from around 1840, while Nos. 14, 20–34, 40–42, and 62 all post-date around 1860, with some of these replacing modest single-storey dwellings. There is some evidence that the large three-storey former Antrim Arms Hotel, and possibly its neighbour No. 56, may have been standing in the early 1830s, though this is not certain.

The 1859 valuation records that the site of the present Nos. 40 and 42 was at that time occupied by a relatively old, long single-storey dwelling, occupied by one John Charles. This earlier building appears to have been demolished sometime after the mid-to-late 1860s, with the present pair of houses erected in its place.

Primary sources consulted include Antrim Papers leases relating to property in Toberwine Street from 1672 onwards (PRONI D.2977), John O'Hara's 1779 map of Glenarm (PRONI D.2977/36/3/1A), paintings of Glenarm Castle dating from between approximately 1768 and 1812 held at the Ulster Museum and in the possession of Lord Dunluce, T.M. Baynes's 1830 view of Glenarm published in Ireland Illustrated (London, 1831), the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland vol. 13 (c.1830–35), the first valuation for Tickmacrevan parish 1833 (PRONI VAL/1B/149), the second valuation notebook for the village of Glenarm 1859 (PRONI VAL/2B/1/41B) and its accompanying town plan (PRONI VAL/2D/1/11), the OS town plan of Glenarm 1903 (PRONI OS/8/103/1), and valuation town plans of 1907–1935 and 1936–57. Secondary sources include C.E.B. Brett's Historic Buildings: Glens of Antrim (Belfast, 1971), Eileen Black's article on a view of Glenarm Castle in The Glynns vol. 7 (1979), Jimmie Irvine's article on the 1779 map of Glenarm in The Glynns vol. 9 (1981), Hon. Hector McDonnell's article on the building of the parish church at Glenarm in The Glynns vol. 10 (1982), and Felix McKillop's Glenarm: A Local History (Glenarm, 1987).