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

This is a very small terraced house of probable pre-1832 construction, sitting on the west side of Altmore Street in Glenarm. It has been substantially modernised and appears to have once formed part of the larger house immediately to its north.

The front (east) elevation is asymmetrical. At ground-floor level to the right is a projecting gabled porch, recently added. The porch has a modern half-glazed front door with what appears to be PVC cladding to the tympanum (the panel above the door within the gable). To both the north and south faces of the porch is a full-width four-pane glazed window set above a rendered stall riser. To the left of the porch is a large modern timber window, and above it at first-floor level is a similar timber window. Both windows are framed by smooth cement bands, while the rest of the front façade is finished in dry dash render. The gabled roof is covered in natural slate, and PVC rainwater goods are fitted throughout. To the south side of the ridge is a plain rendered chimneystack with two matching plain pots. Between the roofs of no. 17 and no. 15 there is a shallow raised parapet with stone copestones. A small front garden to the east is enclosed by a low wall finished in render to match the house, topped with pierced decorative concrete blocks.

The entire ground floor of the rear elevation is obscured by a large modern single-storey flat-roofed extension, also finished in dry dash. On the first floor of the main rear elevation, a small window with a modern frame sits to the left, and a much larger window, also with a modern frame, sits to the right. There is a recent flat-roofed dormer to the rear of the main roof.

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. Documentary evidence for building in the street's vicinity stretches back to the late 17th century: a lease of August 1673 refers to a "housestead, garden of tenement extending back to Altmore Brook", and leases of December 1678 mention "tenements" on the "south side of Altmore" and the existence of a "street". Many of the earliest houses may have been built on the western side. Before 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 this side of the street may originally have faced the river rather than the street. The present no. 15, for instance, appears to have originally had a near-symmetrical elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical one facing the street, whilst no. 29 has a 1739 datestone on its river-facing side. The earliest surviving map of Glenarm, drawn up by John O'Hara in 1779, shows the street fully developed on both sides, with the western terrace stretching 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 significant changes to the street's layout. Much of the eastern terrace was pushed further eastward to create a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No written 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 strongly suggests it took place. This is further supported by an 1830 illustration of the town, which shows the two sections of the eastern terrace out of alignment, and by the fact that many of the buildings recorded in the 1833 valuation of this side of the street appear to bear no relation to those recorded in 1859, as if all had been demolished and replaced. The age and condition grading used in the 1859 valuation indicates that most of the rebuilt dwellings were at least twenty years old by that date, pointing to redevelopment 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 untouched by these mid-19th-century changes, with some of the buildings visible today possibly pre-dating the 1830s, though properties at the very southern end were cleared to make way for the Town Gate and the land absorbed into the estate.

The site of no. 17 is shown as occupied on O'Hara's 1779 map and on all subsequent maps. The property appears to have once belonged to the large house to its north — a building that is probably pre-1832 and perhaps even of mid to late 18th-century date. This is supported by the 1859 valuation map, which shows a dotted rather than solid line between the two buildings, and by the accompanying valuation returns, which record the entire block under a single occupier and owner. By the time of the 1903 Ordnance Survey town plan, however, no. 17 is shown as a separate property.