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

26 Altmore Street, Glenarm

A simple two-storey Georgian-style terraced house, probably built in the mid to later 1830s (though possibly pre-1832), situated on the east side of Altmore Street. The building was completely renovated in 2000–01, with a modern extension added to the rear. It sits within a conservation area and remains in private residential use.

Exterior — Front

The symmetrical front façade faces west. At ground floor centre is the main entrance, comprising a panelled timber door beneath a small elliptical fanlight with metal spider's-web tracery. The doorway is framed by plain pilasters with simple capitals and a moulded architrave. To either side of the doorway is a sash window with Georgian panes in a six-over-six arrangement. The first floor carries three further matching sash windows. The entire front façade is finished in painted lined render with in-and-out bevelled quoins.

Exterior — Rear and Roof

The rear elevation, also in painted render, retains its period character where it survives. At ground floor level to the left is a modern single-storey extension, largely flat-roofed. To the right of the main rear façade is a sash window matching those at the front. At first floor level there are two further matching sash windows alongside a centrally placed French window, recently inserted, which opens onto a patio formed by the roof of the extension below. This patio connects at a high level to the rear garden. The rear yard is fully enclosed: by the garden to the east, the extension to the south, and a return belonging to the neighbouring property to the north.

The gabled roof is slated and has four small skylights to the rear. There is a rendered chimneystack to the north and metal rainwater goods throughout.

The positioning of the chimney breasts within the house suggests that it predates its immediate neighbours to the north and may have stood free-standing for a period.

Outbuilding

At the eastern end of the garden stands a relatively small two-storey rubble-built gabled outbuilding. Its west elevation has a ground-level doorway to the right. The roof of the outbuilding has partially collapsed.

Modern Extension

The new rear extension, though uncompromisingly modern in character, provides an agreeable and imaginative contrast to the Georgian original, and is considered to enhance rather than detract from the building.

Historical Context — Altmore Street

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 reference to building plots in the vicinity appears in 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 a "street" of that name. Many of the earliest houses may have been built on the western side of the street; prior to the walling-in of the Glenarm Castle estate grounds in the 1750s, the village fronted onto both sides of the Glenarm River, and some buildings on the western side may originally have faced the river. The present No. 15, for instance, appears to have originally had an almost symmetrical rear elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical front elevation facing the street, while No. 29 has a date stone of 1739 on its river-facing side rather than its street-facing front.

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 prompted radical changes to the street layout, with much of the eastern terrace pushed further eastward to allow for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No published account of Glenarm's development appears to record this widening, but the discrepancy between the orientation of the eastern terrace as shown on the 1832 and 1857 Ordnance Survey maps strongly suggests it took place. An 1830 illustration of the town shows the two sections of the eastern terrace out of alignment with one another, and the valuation records are also telling: properties recorded on the eastern side in the 1833 valuation appear to bear almost no relation to those recorded in 1859, as though all had been demolished and replaced. The age and condition gradings used in the 1859 valuation indicate that most of the rebuilt dwellings were approximately twenty years old or slightly more at that date, pointing to reconstruction in the mid to later 1830s. This aligns 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 been largely unaffected by these mid-19th-century changes, though some properties at the very southern end were cleared for the Town Gate and the land absorbed into the estate.

Historical Context — No. 26

No. 26 is locally reputed to be one of the oldest properties in Altmore Street. The 1832 Ordnance Survey map shows the site as unoccupied, while the 1859 valuation suggests the house was probably over twenty years old by that date, consistent with construction in the mid to later 1830s. By 1859, the house contained four rooms on the ground floor, four on the first floor, and two garrets. The occupant at that date was one John Parker. Parker may have been a descendant of William Parker, "yeoman of Glenarm," who in 1678 received the lease of a "tenement and garden" with a 35-foot frontage "on the south side of Altmore," together with a further "half tenement" of 21 feet.