36-38 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AP

36–38 Toberwine Street is a substantial three-storey terraced house with a ground-floor shop, probably built around 1835–40, sitting in the centre of the terrace on the east side of Toberwine Street, with its front elevation facing roughly west. The building is not considered to be of architectural interest, though it sits within a conservation area.

The front elevation is asymmetrical. At ground floor level, slightly right of centre, there is a deeply recessed panelled and glazed door leading to the shop. To its left is a relatively large shop window with a recent multi-pane frame, above which is a painted signboard. To the right of the shop door is a panelled door giving access to the ground-floor flat and upper floors. The first floor has three evenly spaced sash windows with Georgian-style panes (six-over-six), and the second floor has three similar but shorter windows, also six-over-six. The front façade is finished in what appears to be recent lined render with in-and-out quoins. The north and south gable ends rise above the neighbouring buildings and are blank.

To the rear, on the south side of the east elevation, there is a recent-looking three-storey gabled return. To its east side is a modern steel fire escape stair. Half-glazed doors at first- and second-floor level open onto a landing. At ground-floor level there is another door with a modern window to its left. To the north, the three-storey return is abutted by a single-storey return, whose north and east faces are blank, while its south face has two modern windows and a partly glazed door. To the right (north) of the three-storey return, the first and second floors of the rear façade of the main building section appear to be exposed, though these floors were largely obscured from view at the time of inspection. The rear elevation is finished in a mixture of what appears to be recent lined and plain render, unpainted. Both the main gabled roof and the roof of the return are slated. There is a rendered chimney stack to the north and a more recent brick stack to the south. The rainwater goods appear to be mainly cast iron.

The house section has in recent times been divided into flats, and large extensions have been added to the rear.

The earliest documented record of the building appears in the 1859 valuation notebook, which describes a property of the same dimensions as the present one (excluding the later return and extensions), noted as containing a shop and a house and described as "not new" at that date — consistent with a construction date of around 1835–40. At that point the owner was listed as James Kelly and the occupant as Bryan Dunne. The valuers recorded the building as containing a shop, four rooms below, four over, and four at the top, with a rear kitchen and room over. These rear rooms were contained within a two-level return approximately 11 feet high, which, according to the accompanying valuation plan, appears to have been positioned further to the north than the present one. In recent times the upper-floor apartment has been subdivided into three flats, the rear return has been rebuilt on a much taller scale, and a single-storey rear return has been added in the process.

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 suggesting considerable antiquity. The 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 other side of the river. Some historians record that the old castle was occupied by tenants — and therefore presumably repaired to some degree — in the later 17th century, though Richard Dobbs makes no mention of it in his 1683 description of the village. The first reference to "Toberwine" in the Antrim Papers appears in a lease of November 1672, with "Toberwine Street" mentioned 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 as fully developed on both sides, with the market and courthouse at the south-west end. No verifiable trace of the old castle is identifiable on the map, but a remark in the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs referring to "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago" suggests that ruins of some kind 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 that many were probably 18th-century in origin. The east side of the street underwent considerably more development after 1833, with numbers 4–12 all dating from around 1840, and numbers 14, 20–34, 40–42 and 62 dating from after around 1860 — some of the latter replacing modest single-storey dwellings. The large three-storey former Antrim Arms Hotel, and possibly its neighbour number 56, may have been standing in the early 1830s, though this is not certain.