12-14 Altmore Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AR

12–14 Altmore Street is a plain, rendered two-storey terraced house dating from around 1835–40, situated in the middle of the terrace on the east side of Altmore Street, Glenarm. It was formerly split into two separate properties but was restored to a single dwelling around 2000. The building has since been substantially rebuilt internally, and all original interior detailing has been removed. Despite this, the front elevation and most of the rear elevation still retain their period character.

The asymmetrical front façade faces west. Roughly to the centre of the ground floor is a panelled timber door with a rectangular five-pane fanlight. To the left of the doorway is a plain sash window. To the right of the doorway is a similar sash window, with a further doorway of the same type at the far right — though this second door is no longer in use. The first floor has three evenly spaced sliding sash windows set on a sill course. The front façade is finished in lined render with V-jointed quoins.

To the centre right of the ground floor on the rear façade is a partly glazed door. To the left of this is a large, recently inserted patio door. To the far right is a plain sash window, with three more sash windows on the first floor above. The rear façade is finished in roughcast. The gabled roof is slated and has two Velux windows to the rear. There are two rendered chimneystacks, shared with the adjoining properties. The rainwater goods appear to be cast iron.

Altmore Street takes its name from the Altmore River, a narrow brook flowing from the high ground to the south-east down to the Glenarm River to the west. The earliest recorded reference to building plots in the vicinity dates from 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 mention a "street" by name. Many of the earliest houses in the street may have been built on the western side. Prior to the walling in of the estate grounds immediately around Glenarm Castle in the 1750s, the village fronted onto both sides of the Glenarm River, and some buildings on this side of the street may originally have faced the river rather than the street. The present no. 15, for instance, appears to have originally had an almost symmetrical rear elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical front elevation facing the street, while no. 29 has a 1739 date stone 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, which appears to have taken place some time between 1832 and 1857, seems to have brought about radical changes to the layout of the street. Much of the eastern terrace was pushed further eastward, allowing for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No published account of the development of Glenarm appears to make reference to this widening of the street, but the discrepancy between the alignment of much 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 suggests that most of the houses on this side were single storey at that date. The fact that many of the buildings recorded in the 1833 valuation of the eastern side of the street appear to bear no relation to those recorded in the 1859 valuation — as if all had been demolished — points in the same direction. The age and condition grading of properties used in the 1859 valuation indicates that most of the rebuilt dwellings were around 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 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." The western side of Altmore Street may have remained largely untouched by these mid-19th-century changes, with some buildings possibly pre-dating the 1830s, though a number of properties at the southern end were cleared away with the construction of the Town Gate and the land incorporated into the estate.

No. 12–14 appears to date from the mid to later 1830s, in keeping with the general redevelopment of the eastern side of the street described above. It is almost certainly the property recorded in the 1859 valuation as being of the same dimensions and graded "B+", indicating it was probably just over twenty years old at that time. The occupants at that stage are listed as "Orr Semple & Co.", raising the possibility that the building was used for some form of business. The occupants leased directly from the Antrim estate. Annotations to the map accompanying the 1859 valuation show that the building was subsequently divided into two properties, before being restored to its original single-property form around 2000.