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

This is a tall, plain two-storey terraced house of possible pre-1832 construction, renovated in around the 1960s, and now fitted with enlarged window openings and modern window frames throughout. It sits on the east side of Altmore Street, with its asymmetrical front elevation facing west.

On the ground floor of the front elevation is a centre-right doorway with a modern, partly glazed door. To its left is a large picture window with a modern frame, and a similar window to its right, with two further windows at first-floor level. The front façade is finished in painted roughcast. At the rear, the ground floor has a large window with a modern frame, a doorway with a modern glazed door, and a recently inserted patio door. The first floor of the rear has four windows of varying size, all with modern frames, and the rear façade is also finished in roughcast. The upper section of the north gable is rendered. The gabled roof is slated and has a small Velux window to the rear. There are two rendered chimneystacks. Rainwater goods are a mixture of cast iron and PVC.

Altmore Street takes its name from the Altmore River, a narrow brook that flows from the high ground to the south-east down to the Glenarm River to the west. The earliest known reference to building plots in this vicinity appears in a lease of August 1673, which mentions a "housestead, garden of tenement… extending back to Altmore Brook." Further leases of December 1678 refer to "tenements" on the "south side of Altmore," and some of those same 1678 leases also mention the presence of a "street." Many of the earliest houses may have been built on the western side of the street, 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 the western side may even originally have faced the river: the present No. 15, for instance, 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 datestone 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 terrace to the west 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 led to radical changes to the layout of the street, with much of the eastern terrace pushed further eastward to allow for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate itself. No published account of Glenarm's development appears to mention this widening of the street, but the discrepancy between the alignment of the eastern terrace as shown on the 1832 Ordnance Survey map 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 terrace on the eastern side 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 the 1859 valuation — as though all had been demolished in the intervening years. The age and condition gradings used in the 1859 valuation indicate that most of the rebuilt dwellings on the east side were approximately twenty years old or slightly more at that date, placing much of the redevelopment in the mid to later 1830s. This is consistent with a remark in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1835, which notes 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."

Whilst much of the eastern side of the street appears to have been rebuilt in the mid to later 1830s, the Ordnance Survey maps of 1834 and 1857, together with the 1859 valuation returns, all suggest that a stretch of terrace at the northern end survived this redevelopment. No. 4 may have been one of those survivors: the site is shown as continuously occupied on both maps, and a house of the same dimensions is recorded in the 1859 valuation, where the valuers describe it as "old" — graded "C+", implying an age of perhaps fifty years or more at that point. It is therefore highly likely that this property predates the 1830s, and it may be considerably older. The site is shown as occupied by a substantial-looking building on O'Hara's 1779 map. In 1859 the house was recorded as being in the hands of a Charles Connolly and occupied by a Jane Thompson, with four rooms below, three above, and an attic.

The property lies within a conservation area.