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

28 Altmore Street is a three-storey late Georgian style terraced house dating from approximately the early 1840s, located on the east side of Altmore Street in Glenarm, County Antrim. It forms one of a group of three identical properties, the others being nos. 30 and 32 immediately to the south, and sits within a conservation area.

The front elevation faces west and is asymmetric. At ground floor level, a panelled timber door with a plain rectangular fanlight is positioned to the left. The door opening is framed by pilasters decorated with simple Greek key incisions and is surmounted by a projecting cornice and blocking course. To the right of the door is a window with a PVC frame made to resemble a sash with Georgian panes. The first floor has two similar windows, and the second floor has two smaller windows of the same type. The front façade is finished in a 'salt and pepper' dry dash render, with in-out quoins to the left (north) corner. The north gable rises above the two-storey no. 26 next door, and the exposed rendered section of this gable is blank.

To the rear, the east elevation features a large, recent-looking single-storey flat-roofed extension to the right side. The south face of this extension has a modern door with a modern window to its right. The north face of the extension abuts no. 26 and is blank, while the east face abuts a retaining wall that holds back a higher-level raised garden area. To the left of the extension, on the rear façade of the main building, there is a window matching those at the front. On the first floor, a similar window appears to the left, with a smaller stairwell window fitted with a fixed-light PVC frame to the right. The second floor has two windows broadly similar to those at the front. The rear elevation, including the extension, is finished in plain painted render. The main roof is gabled and slated, with two rendered chimneystacks. Rainwater goods are cast iron to the front and PVC to the rear.

Within the raised garden to the east stands a gabled single-storey outbuilding, rubble-built with a corrugated iron roof, which was once used as a schoolhouse.

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 this area date from a lease of August 1673 mentioning a 'housestead, garden of tenement…extending back to Altmore Brook', with further references from December 1678 to 'tenements' on the 'south side of Altmore' and to the presence of a 'street'. Many of the earliest houses on the street may have been built on the western side, since prior to the walling in of the Glenarm Castle estate grounds in the 1750s, the village fronted onto both sides of the Glenarm River. Some buildings on the western side may originally have faced the river rather than the street: the present no. 15 appears to have had an almost symmetrical rear elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical front elevation facing the street, while no. 29 has a 1739 date stone on its river-facing side. The earliest surviving map of Glenarm, drawn by John O'Hara in 1779, shows the street fully developed on both sides, with the western terrace extending further south than it does 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 brought about radical changes to the street's layout, with much of the eastern terrace pushed further eastward to allow for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No contemporary account of this widening has been found, but the discrepancy between the alignment of the eastern terrace as shown on the 1832 and 1857 Ordnance Survey maps supports this conclusion. An 1830 illustration of the town shows the two sections of terrace on the eastern side out of alignment, and the buildings recorded in the 1833 valuation for this side of the street appear to bear almost no relation to those recorded in 1859, as though all had been demolished and replaced. The age and condition grading used in the 1859 valuation indicates that most of the rebuilt dwellings were around twenty years old or slightly more at that point, suggesting the redevelopment largely took place in the mid to late 1830s. This is consistent 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 undisturbed by these mid-19th century changes, with some buildings possibly pre-dating the 1830s, though some properties at the very southern end were cleared for the construction of the Town Gate and the land absorbed into the estate.

No. 28 and its two identical neighbours, nos. 30 and 32, date from approximately 1840 to 1845 and are believed, on the basis of various sources and physical evidence, to be the last terrace houses built during the post-1832 widening of Altmore Street. All three are recorded in the 1859 valuation as being just under twenty years old at that date. An illustration in an 1843 publication, dating from somewhere between 1836 and 1842–3, shows the ground on which nos. 28–32 now stand as vacant, confirming the building date. The occupant listed in 1859 is a William Burke, who leased or rented the house from James Hannah, Lord Antrim's agent. A note in the valuation records that shortly before this the property was in the hands of the Reverend James Caldwell, minister of Glenarm Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church between 1855 and approximately 1883, who is believed to have run a school from the outbuilding at the rear. One local resident has suggested that the house and its two identical neighbours were built as coastguard officers' dwellings, but no evidence has been found to support this.