21-23 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AP

21–23 Toberwine Street is a plain two-storey rendered terraced house on the west side of Toberwine Street, Glenarm, possibly pre-dating 1832 in origin. The building originally comprised two separate properties and remained so until the 1990s, when the two dwellings were amalgamated into a single home, with window and door openings altered in the process. It is not listed and has been assessed as not meeting the criteria for listing, being of neither special architectural nor special historic interest, though it does sit within a conservation area.

The front (east) façade is asymmetrical and finished in unpainted lined render. Slightly right of centre is a timber panelled door with a plain rectangular fanlight above. To its left are two sash windows with horizontal glazing bars in a 2-over-2 configuration: the far-left window is a recent insertion (a former window in this position sat slightly further to the right), while the window next to it was created out of what was previously a doorway. To the right of the entrance door is a further window of the same type. The first floor has three evenly spaced windows of similar character. There is a cast iron skylight to the front roof slope.

The rear façade is finished in unpainted roughcast. At ground floor level on the left side there is a combined door and window opening; on the right side is a larger, recently inserted window. At first-floor level are two widely spaced windows, with a further window set at half-landing height in the centre. All rear windows have modern frames. Two Velux windows are set into the rear roof slope. The gabled roof is slated, with a brick chimney stack to the north and cast iron rainwater goods throughout.

To the west side of the rear yard stands a large gabled outbuilding finished in painted render, its roof partly covered in natural slate and partly in corrugated asbestos.

The site is shown as occupied on John O'Hara's 1779 map of Glenarm — the earliest surviving plan of the village — and on all subsequent maps. The building as it stands today is thought to be substantially the same two-storey house, of the same dimensions, recorded in the 1833 valuation as the home of one John Wilson. A person of the same name (or a relative) is listed as the occupant in the 1859 valuation, at which point the building contained a shop and two ground-floor apartments, four rooms on the upper floor, and two garrets. At some point, probably during the 20th century, the shop was converted to residential use, giving the building two separate dwellings. These remained distinct until the 1990s amalgamation.

Toberwine Street itself — whose name translates as "Street of the Sweet Well" — is believed to represent the original area of settlement within Glenarm. Its narrowness hints at its antiquity. The original 13th-century castle of Glenarm, around which the village grew, is thought 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 never repaired, with his descendant Sir Randal McDonnell building a new residence on the opposite side of the river. Some historians suggest the old castle was later occupied by tenants — and therefore repaired to some degree — in the later 17th century, but 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; the name "Toberwine Street" itself appears in a lease of August 1709. By O'Hara's 1779 map the street is shown fully developed on both sides, with the market and courthouse at its south-west end. No verifiable trace of the old castle appears on that map, though the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs note "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago," suggesting ruins of some kind survived into the early 19th century. Evidence from the 1833 valuation indicates that most buildings now visible on the west side of the street were present in some form by that date and were probably of 18th-century origin. The east side of the street underwent considerably more development after 1833, with nos. 4–12 dating from around 1840 and nos. 20–34 and 62 from after around 1860, some of the latter replacing modest single-storey dwellings.