4-8 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AP

4–8 Toberwine Street is a large, plain two-storey rendered terrace house dating from around the 1840s, situated in the middle of a short terrace at the north-east end of Toberwine Street in Glenarm. The property was originally a dwelling and now functions as a shop. It falls within a conservation area but is not listed, having been assessed and found not to merit listing.

The front elevation faces roughly west and is asymmetrical. At ground floor level, slightly right of centre, is a recent timber panelled door with a plain rectangular fanlight. To its left is a relatively recent shop front with a recessed doorway and large plate glass window. To the right of the house doorway is a large picture window with a recent frame, this opening having been enlarged in the mid-1970s. At the far right of the ground floor is a large elliptical-headed carriage arch fitted with timber-sheeted double doors. The first floor has six windows with modern frames. The entire front façade is finished in dry dash.

At the rear, the ground floor to the right has a single-storey projection with a mono-pitched slated roof, which has been further extended to the south by the addition of a PVC conservatory. To the east, this projection abuts a large outbuilding. To the left of the projection is a large window with a modern frame, and at the far left is the rear face of the carriage arch. At first-floor level there are two windows to the left, broadly similar to those at the front but of differing sizes. To the right of these, at half-landing level, is a semicircular-headed window filled with stained glass. At the far right on the first floor proper is a further window. The rear façade is finished in roughcast, painted at ground-floor level. The gabled roof is slated and has three Velux windows and a small cast iron skylight to the rear. There are three unevenly spaced rendered chimneystacks. Rainwater goods are cast iron. Internal detailing has been altered.

Toberwine Street — whose name translates as "Street of the Sweet Well" — is believed to represent the original area of settlement within the village of Glenarm, its narrowness suggesting some antiquity. The original 13th-century castle of Glenarm, around which the village developed, 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 demolished 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 reference to it in his 1683 description of the village. The first mention of "Toberwine" in the Antrim Papers appears in a lease of November 1672, referring to a house within the area, with "Toberwine Street" named in a lease of August 1709. On John O'Hara's 1779 map of Glenarm — the earliest surviving plan of the village — the street is shown fully developed on both sides, with the market and courthouse at the south-west end. No verifiable trace of the old castle is identifiable on the map, but a remark in the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs concerning "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago" suggests that some ruins may have survived into the early 19th century.

Evidence from the valuation of 1833 indicates that most of the 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 saw considerably more development after 1833, with numbers 4–12 all dating from around 1840, and numbers 14, 20–34, and 62 post-dating around 1860 — some of the latter replacing modest single-storey dwellings. There is some evidence, though not certain, that the large three-storey former Antrim Arms Hotel and possibly its neighbour number 56 may have been standing in the early 1830s.

On the Ordnance Survey map of 1832, buildings are shown further to the east of the present site. The current terrace first appears on the revised Ordnance Survey map of 1857 and in greater detail on the second valuation map of 1859. On the basis of its overall design and detailing, it is considered more likely that the terrace was built closer to 1832 than 1859, probably in the early 1840s. The notebook accompanying the second valuation records that by 1859 the block contained three dwellings belonging to John, James, and William McMullan, with James occupying numbers 4–8. The valuation gives no indication that the building contained a shop at that time.