36 Altmore Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AR

36 Altmore Street is a substantial but relatively plain two-storey rendered house, probably built between 1859 and 1864, most likely as the residence of the Reverend James Calwell (Caldwell), minister of Glenarm Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church from 1855. During his tenure the house served as a de facto manse. After his retirement or death in 1883, it became a purely private dwelling, with a purpose-built manse erected next to the Non-subscribing church itself. The building sits on the east side of the southern end of Altmore Street, at its junction with Town Brae Road and close to the Town Gate of the Glenarm Castle estate.

The front façade faces east and is symmetrical. At its centre on the ground floor is a large elliptical-headed doorway with a recessed door screen comprising a panelled timber door with panelled pilaster-like jambs, sidelights with panelled aprons, and an elliptical fanlight with spoke tracery. The doorway opening is encased with panelled pilasters and a moulded archivolt. To the left of the doorway is a relatively small sash window with vertical glazing bars in a 2-over-2 arrangement, and to the right is a similar window. The first floor has three similar but slightly smaller windows. The front façade is finished in painted lined render with v-jointed in-out quoins.

The north gable has a window to the right on both the ground and first floors, matching the front windows in style. It is finished in painted lined render with in-out quoins to the right. The south gable has a single window roughly to the centre of the ground floor. To the left of this window the gable is abutted by what appears to be a gate but is in fact a modern metal up-and-over garage door. The south gable is finished in painted roughcast with regular quoins to the left. The rear façade appears to be finished in painted lined render without quoins, and the only portion visible to the surveyors — who were not permitted access to the rear yard — was a plain sash window to the right-hand side on the first floor. Map evidence suggests there are no projections or extensions to the rear.

The gabled roof is slated, with two small cast-iron skylights to the front. The roof has a slight overhang to the south, with plain bargeboards. There are two rendered chimneystacks, one to each gable end.

To the front, a small garden is enclosed by low rendered walls with relatively recent wrought iron pedestrian gates and square pyramid-capped piers. To the rear, the yard is enclosed by a high rendered wall. On the east side of the rear yard stands a large but low-proportioned two-storey outbuilding, probably originally a stable or servants' lodging. It is rendered with a slated gabled roof, rendered parapets, and rendered chimneystacks. On its east façade there is a timber-sheeted door to the upper floor, reached via a stair, with a 2-over-2 sash window to its right. The ground floor of this façade could not be seen, the north gable is blank, and the remaining elevations were obscured from view. South of the main house is a relatively recent flat-roofed garage.

Sufficient period detail remains both internally and externally for statutory protection to be considered appropriate.

Altmore Street takes its name from the Altmore River, a narrow brook running from the high ground to the south-east down to the Glenarm River to the west. The earliest documentary references to building plots in this area date from a lease of August 1673 mentioning a house, garden, and tenement extending back to Altmore Brook, with further references to tenements on the south side of Altmore in December 1678 leases, which also mention the existence of a street at that time. Many of the earliest houses may have stood on the western side of the street, since prior to the walling-in of the Glenarm Castle estate grounds in the 1750s the village fronted onto both sides of the Glenarm River. Some buildings on this western side may even originally have faced the river: the present number 15 appears to have originally had an almost symmetrical rear elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical front elevation facing the street, while number 29 has a date stone of 1739 on its river-facing side rather than its street-facing front.

The earliest surviving map of Glenarm, drawn 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. The construction of the Town Gate, which appears to have taken place some time between 1832 and 1857, seems to have prompted radical changes to the layout of the street, with much of the terrace on the eastern side pushed further eastwards to allow for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No written account of this widening has been found by the surveyors, but the discrepancy between the alignment of the eastern terrace shown on the 1832 Ordnance Survey map and that of 1857 strongly suggests it occurred. This theory is further supported by an 1830 illustration of the town which shows the two sections of the eastern terrace out of alignment with one another, and by 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 and rebuilt. The age and condition gradings used in the 1859 valuation indicate that most of the rebuilt dwellings were approximately twenty years old or slightly more at that date, placing the bulk 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 had recently been 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 the changes of the mid-19th century, with some buildings possibly pre-dating the 1830s, though a number of properties at the very southern end were cleared away when the Town Gate was constructed and the land absorbed into the estate.

Unlike most of the east side of Altmore Street, which dates from the street-widening of the mid to later 1830s, number 36 is probably somewhat later. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey map of 1857 or the valuation map of 1859, but is recorded in the accompanying valuation notebook — which contains annotations dating as late as 1864 — as recently built and occupied by Reverend James Calwell. A correction in the notebook suggests that shortly before 1859 he had been living at the present number 28 Altmore Street and running a school from an outbuilding to the rear, confirmed by the current owner of number 28. This implies that he moved to number 36 between 1859 and 1864, and that he was probably responsible for its construction.