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

No. 2 Altmore Street is a small, two-storey terraced house in the urban vernacular tradition, dating from around 1840. It is not considered to be of special architectural or historic interest, though it sits within a conservation area.

The house is wedged between taller properties near the northern end of the east side of Altmore Street, close to its junction with Vennel Street. The front (west) elevation is asymmetrical. At ground floor level, slightly left of centre, is a half-glazed four-panel door. To the left of the door is a plain sash window, with a similar window to the right. At first floor level, two almost evenly spaced sash windows repeat the same pattern. The entire front façade is finished in painted roughcast render.

The rear of the building could not be accessed during survey, and only an oblique view of the upper portion of the rear façade was possible. No evidence of any extensions was visible from this angle. The rear wall is finished in plain roughcast render. The rear of the house opens onto a small enclosed yard, accessible only through the house itself.

The gabled roof is covered in natural slate. To the south side of the ridge, a plain, tall rendered chimneystack rises, shared with the chimney of the neighbouring No. 4. The wall between No. 1 Vennel Street and this house appears to be a party wall, and as a result the roof covering appears to cut into, or overlap, the roof of that neighbouring property.

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 places building activity in the street's vicinity as far back as the late 17th century: a lease of August 1673 mentions a "housestead, garden of tenement…extending back to Altmore Brook," while leases of December 1678 refer to "tenements" on the "south side of Altmore" and mention the presence of a "street." Many of the earliest houses may have been built on the western side, since before 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 that side of the street 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 datestone of 1739 on its river-facing side rather than its street-facing front.

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 extending further south than it does today, beyond the line of the present Town Gate to the Glenarm Castle estate. The construction of that Town Gate, sometime between 1832 and 1857, appears to have led to radical changes to the layout of the street: much of the terrace on the eastern side was pushed further eastward, allowing for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No published account of Glenarm's development appears to mention this widening, but the discrepancy between the alignment of much of the eastern terrace as shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1832 and that of 1857 strongly suggests it took place. This theory is further supported by an 1830 illustration of the town by T. M. Baynes, published in Ireland Illustrated (London, 1831), 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 the eastern side of the street appear to bear no relation to those recorded in the valuation of 1859 — as though all had been demolished in the intervening period. The age and condition gradings used in the 1859 valuation indicate that most of the rebuilt dwellings on this side were approximately twenty years old or slightly more at that date, placing much of the redevelopment in the mid to later 1830s. This accords 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 the changes of the mid-19th century, and some buildings there may predate the 1830s, though properties at the very southern end were cleared away during the construction of the Town Gate and the land absorbed into the estate.

The site of No. 2 does not appear to be occupied on O'Hara's map of 1779, nor on the Ordnance Survey map of 1832, though on the latter it is difficult to be entirely certain of this. The present house is undoubtedly the building of the same dimensions shown on the valuation plan of 1859, at which date the property was occupied by a James McNeill and contained two rooms below and one above. The 1859 valuers gave no indication of the age of the building at that time.