St Patricks ((C of I) parish church, The Cloney, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AB

St Patrick's Church of Ireland Parish Church, Glenarm, County Antrim — built 1763–1769

St Patrick's is a relatively simple, largely rendered, single-storey Gothic Church of Ireland parish church, built between approximately 1763 and 1769, with a tower and spire. It holds a remarkable distinction as the earliest known example of the Strawberry Hill "gothick" style in an ecclesiastical building in Ireland, and it stands on the site of a Franciscan friary founded in 1465. The church is sited on the north side of The Cloney Road, to the west of the mouth of the Glenarm River. It replaced a pre-1683 church which had originally stood on the south side of Castle Street but had, by the 1750s, become ruinous.

HISTORY AND CONSTRUCTION

Work on the new church began in early 1763, the masonry carried out by a stonemason named William McBride, who contracted to build the stone walls — furnishing stone and mortar at his own expense — at four shillings to the mason's perch regardless of wall thickness. The Earl of Antrim agreed to supply barrows, mortar boxes and scaffolding materials, and to make staged payments to McBride: ten pounds on laying the foundations, twenty pounds more when the work was ready for the window sills, and the remainder when the stonework was complete and ready for the roof. By the end of July 1763, McBride had completed the walls to sill level. By March 1764, some 13,000 slates had been delivered by a James Menarey at a cost of eighteen shillings per thousand. The church was finally consecrated in 1769.

Some documents have mistakenly described the spire as a later addition, but vestry minutes going back to 1720 refer to the spire, and minutes from the 1763 building period describe the church as having a tower, spire, nave and a small chancel with slanted sides. The building appears to have remained in its 1760s form until 1822, when the spire was rebuilt and the church enlarged at a cost of £1,200 — £300 of which was provided by the Board of First Fruits and Tenths. It is uncertain precisely what this enlargement entailed, though a large section of the transept to the east side (originally the Antrim family pew) is shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1832.

The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of around 1830 describe the building as "very fine…in good repair and very well fitted up." A further report of 1835 called it "plain and modern," noted a gallery inside, described it as "neatly and comfortably fitted up internally" with capacity for about 180 people, and recorded a clock in the steeple signed "Benson of Whitehaven 1759," which had been added to the church in 1806 by Sir Henry Vane. William Makepeace Thackeray, writing in 1843, found the building "grave looking" but admired its "beautiful steeple."

The Ordnance Survey map of 1857 shows the church largely as it appeared in 1832, but with a small projection beside the transept. In 1876–78, under the architect S. P. Close, at a cost of over £600, the original chancel — a small hipped-roof projection — was removed and replaced with a larger one, the transept was enlarged, and a small porch was added to the east side of the tower. The nave windows were also enlarged. Internally, the gallery was removed, the base of the tower was converted to a baptistry, and a new heating system was installed. The present roof trusses may date from this period, though this is not certain.

EXTERIOR

The 19th-century additions — a gabled front porch, a double-gabled organ and choir transept, a chancel, and a squat asymmetric pitched-roof vestry — are considered slightly awkward in character.

The tower rises to three storeys at the south gable. Its exposed corners have reducing diagonal buttresses, and its faces are finished in lined render. The top of the tower is finished with regular battlemented parapets and is crowned by an octagonal spire of brick construction, rendered — presumably in the early 20th century — and pierced with small roundel openings along its height.

To the east face of the tower sits the gabled porch, added in 1878, built in squared basalt rubble with sandstone dressings. Its entrance is a Gothic arch-headed opening framed with three-quarter pilasters bearing floral capitals and a moulded archivolt, all in smooth sandstone, with small diagonal buttresses to the corners. The north face of the porch is blank; the south face has two paired Gothic arch-headed windows with smooth sandstone dressings and lattice panes.

Above the porch on the east face of the tower, the first floor is blank, while the second floor has an ogee arch-headed opening with louvres and a moulded surround. Fine moulded string courses mark the ground and second-floor ceiling levels.

The south face of the tower has a large pointed arch-headed window in sandstone at ground-floor level, with a moulded dripstone and carved-head label stops that appear to depict kings and queens. The window's geometric tracery consists of paired lancets with cusps surmounted by a trefoil rose. At first-floor level there is an ogee arch-headed opening with paired lancet windows. The second floor has a louvered opening matching that on the east face, and directly below it is a blue enamelled circular clock face with gold-painted Roman numerals and hands. The clock is by Benson of Whitehaven and is dated 1759; the bell dates to 1758.

The west face of the tower has a louvered opening at second-floor level; the lower floors are blank. The gable of the church proper half-overlaps the tower on this side, creating a boiler room at ground level and a storeroom at first-floor level. The north face of the tower has a louvered opening at second-floor level; the lower areas are obscured by the main gable.

On the exposed portion of the south gable to the left (west) of the tower there is a pointed arch window at first-floor level.

The west main elevation of the nave has three pointed arch windows matching those on the ground floor of the south face of the tower. To the far right of this elevation is a plain ground-level door to the boiler room, and to the left is a tall narrow lancet window with a square-headed drip moulding and label stops. The nave on this side is rendered, as is the tower.

To the centre of the north elevation projects the gable of the chancel. The chancel ridge is slightly lower than the main roof and the chancel is slightly narrower than the main building. Its gable carries a large pointed arch window with double-lancet tracery, and the gable apex is finished with a small stone Celtic-style cross. The west face of the chancel has two high-level pointed arch windows with in-and-out sandstone dressings; the east face has a window to the left matching those on the west face. The chancel is finished in dry dash with in-and-out sandstone quoins.

The east elevation of the nave is largely obscured by three projections. To the right is the vestry, whose north gable is asymmetric and finished in dry dash; below the ridge is a pair of cusped windows. The east face is in squared basalt and is blank, while the similarly finished south face has a flat arch-headed door opening with a plain timber sheeted door.

To the left of the vestry is the double-gabled choir and organ transept. The right-hand gable has a small centred Gothic arch-headed window. The larger left-hand gable has a centred pointed arch window in sandstone with geometric tracery. The south face of this projection has a tall narrow flat arch-headed window, and to the left of this window the coursing of the stonework suggests the former presence of an ogee arch-headed doorway. At the junction of the main wall and the transept projection is a stone chimney stack.

On the exposed section of the nave façade to the left of the transept there is a large pointed arch window similar to that on the left gable of the transept itself, and to the upper left of this is a small gabled half-dormer with a pointed arch window.

The roof is slated throughout. Rainwater goods are in cast iron.

FRIARY REMAINS AND SETTING

The church stands on the site of a Franciscan friary founded in 1465 by Alexander McDonnell and Robert McEoin Bisset. The friary initially escaped the dissolution of such houses in the 1530s and 1540s and appears to have continued in some use after 1558 — Edmond McKenna, a Franciscan writing in the 1640s, described serving there in Queen Elizabeth's reign. By 1683, however, the site was in ruins. Much of the remaining walls were pulled down in the 1760s and the stone used in building the church itself. The ruins of part of the friary can still be seen in the graveyard to the west of the church, and the church appears to have been built over a large part of the ruin itself. The church is also designated a monument under the SMR reference ANT29/6.

The church sits within its own small graveyard, with graves to the west and north; the earliest headstones observed were from the mid-18th century. The boundary to the road on the south side is formed by a low stone wall with decorative cast iron railings, probably of the late 19th century, including a gateway with gates matching the railings and square stone piers with pyramidal caps.