28-30 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Counry Antrim, BT44 0AP

28–30 Toberwine Street, Glenarm

These two plain 2½-storey terraced houses sit on the east side of Toberwine Street, with their front facades facing roughly west. Neither is considered to be of architectural interest, though both fall within a conservation area.

No. 28 (the southern house) dates from around 1910 and was formerly used as a shop. Its front facade is asymmetrical and finished in plain painted render, with a roughcast finish to the rear. The ground floor features a panelled door, with two windows to the left fitted with modern frames. The first floor has two similar windows, with a smaller window set within a large gabled half-dormer above. The gabled roof is finished mainly in asbestos tiles. To the rear there is a large modern-style, timber-clad flat-roofed dormer with a single window facing east, along with a Velux window. There is a rendered chimneystack to the south on the ridge, and a smaller stack to the rear of the roof beside the dormer. The rear facade could not be seen in its entirety due to the proximity of a high wall; a high-level window is visible to the right at first-floor level, with a slightly lower opening to the left, and the ground floor was entirely obscured.

No. 30 (the northern house) was built around 1910 but demolished and replaced by a new building constructed in the 1980s in a similar style. Its front facade is also asymmetrical and finished in plain painted render, with roughcast to the rear. To the left of the ground floor there is a large pedestrian archway, with the entrance door to the house positioned on the south wall within the archway. To the right of this is a plain sash window. The first floor has two plain sash windows, with a smaller window set within a large gabled half-dormer above. To the rear, the passageway is visible at ground-floor level. At first-floor level to the rear there is a timber-faced balcony with a glazed door opening onto it, and a small single-pane window to the right. The gabled roof is slated, with a modern-style gabled dormer and a Velux window to the rear. There is a rendered chimneystack to the south.

Both houses are set within a continuous terrace. The current use of both properties is residential.

Toberwine Street — whose name is generally translated as "street of the sweet well" — is considered to represent one of the earliest areas of settlement within the village of Glenarm. Its narrowness is thought to reflect its antiquity. The original 13th-century castle of Glenarm, around which the village developed, is believed to have stood at the south-west corner of the street, on the site now occupied by the former courthouse. The castle was deliberately destroyed by Sorley Boy MacDonnell in 1597 and apparently not repaired; his descendant Sir Randal McDonnell subsequently built a new residence on the other side of the river. Some historians record that the old castle was occupied by tenants — and therefore presumably repaired to some degree — in the later 17th century, though Richard Dobbs makes no mention of it in his 1683 description of the village.

The first reference to "Toberwine" in the Antrim Papers appears in a lease of November 1672, which refers to a house in the area; "Toberwine Street" is mentioned by name in a lease of August 1709. On John O'Hara's map of Glenarm dated 1779 — the earliest surviving plan of the village — the street is shown as fully developed on both sides, with the market and courthouse at the south-western end. There is no verifiable indication of castle remains shown on the map, but a remark in the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs referring to "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago" suggests that ruins of some kind may have survived into the early 19th century.

Evidence from the 1833 valuation suggests that most of the buildings now visible on the west side of Toberwine Street were present in some form by that date, and that many were probably 18th-century in origin. The east side of the street saw considerably more development after 1833, with nos. 4–12 dating from around 1840, and nos. 14, 20–34 and 62 all post-dating around 1860 — some of the latter replacing modest single-storey dwellings. There is some evidence to suggest that the large three-storey former Antrim Arms Hotel, and possibly its neighbour no. 56, may have been standing in the early 1830s, though this is not certain.

In the case of nos. 28–30 specifically, the present no. 28 appears to have been built around 1910, replacing a single-storey dwelling of pre-1859 construction. No. 30 is of more recent origin, having been built after 1977 (estimated at around the 1980s) on the site of a previous dwelling which, like its neighbour, appears to have dated from around 1910.