10 High Street, Carrickfergus, Co Antrim

Number 10 High Street is a substantial three-storey terraced townhouse in the centre of Carrickfergus, now divided into three shop units with late 20th and early 21st century frontages. Although the street front presents an unremarkable late Victorian or Edwardian appearance, the building conceals within it evidence of a structure of late medieval origin that assumed much of its present form across two phases of heightening in around the 1670s to 1680s and again in the late 17th or early 18th century. Urban buildings in Northern Ireland that can be shown to predate 1700 are rare, and those of late medieval or Tudor origin are virtually unknown outside of the immediately neighbouring Dobbin's Hotel at numbers 6 to 8 High Street. Despite considerable alterations in recent decades, number 10 is of significant archaeological and architectural importance, and its setting in terms of scale and townscape character remains largely intact.

The building sits on the northwest side of High Street, next to Dobbin's Hotel, which itself evolved from a late medieval tower house. The main block is three storeys in height and rhomboid in plan, with a double-pitch roof. To the southwest of centre at the rear is a full-height return with a similar roof, with the southwest portion of this extending slightly further back, its wall set at an angle on this side. Attached to the rear of the return is a long, lower single-storey annex with a corrugated-iron double-pitch roof; to the northwest this merges with a lower flat-roofed section covering the remainder of the plot on that side. Both of these rear sections were added in the 1950s and have been adapted since, and are of little architectural interest.

The southeast-facing street frontage is asymmetrical. The ground floor is occupied by three shopfronts of differing sizes, all of recent design; the rightmost was a vehicle entrance until approximately the 1960s or 1970s. The remainder of the facade above the shopfronts, including the far left-hand end, is rendered. At each of the upper floors there is a double-light window to the far left, followed by a single-light window, a further double-light window, and another single-light window to the far right, all with moulded surrounds. This fenestration arrangement was established sometime between 1884 and around 1900, when a pair of full-height canted bay windows — probably themselves mid-19th century additions — were removed. There appears to be a moulded stringcourse between the first and second floors. The main roof and that of the return are covered in artificial slate, with a single rendered chimneystack to the northeast end of the ridge; there were originally four stacks in total. Rainwater goods are PVC.

The rear elevation is dominated by the large 1950s extensions. The older sections of the building still visible to this side are finished in roughcast and appear devoid of openings, though internal evidence shows that several windows formerly existed here but have since been blocked. There is a single PVC-framed window to the second floor of the southwest side of the return.

Of particular significance internally is the rear stair projection, which contains part of a mid to later 17th century staircase. The building also retains substantial portions of thick rubble walling that may date from the 1500s or earlier, upper-level construction in brickwork of the 17th and 18th centuries, and stout timber ceiling beams that may also be of 16th or 17th century date. The lower stonework of the walling is notably similar to that of the neighbouring Dobbin's Hotel, a pre-1560 tower house.

The documentary and cartographic history of the site is extensive. A pictorial map of around 1560 appears to show a single- or one-and-a-half-storey building, part of a long and seemingly uniform stone-built terrace, abutting the northeast side of the tower house that now forms Dobbin's Hotel. Robert Lythe's map of around 1567 shows a different arrangement, with the tower depicted as freestanding and a small seemingly detached building to the northwest, with no sign of the terraces; however, as Lythe did include the more haphazardly-sited vernacular dwellings in the backlands of the town, it is difficult to dismiss his omission of the terrace as deliberate inaccuracy. A map of 1596 clearly shows a lower structure directly against Dobbin's, along with the rest of the similarly low-profile rows of houses. On balance, the evidence suggests that this site had been developed by the end of the 16th century, and possibly at least in part as early as the 1560s, an argument supported by the archaeological finding that the lower stonework of number 10's walls is similar to that of Dobbin's Hotel itself.

Thomas Philips's map of 1685 shows the street layout much as it is today, though it gives little detail about the buildings. The map published in the British Magazine in May 1760 and that by James O'Kane of 1821 both show High Street fully developed. Given the presence of 17th century brickwork and the mid to later 17th century staircase in the rear projection, the structure appears to have taken on a two-and-a-half-storey form — that is, two storeys plus a garret — in the mid to later 1600s, with dendrochronological evidence suggesting the 1670s to 1680s. Subsequently, alterations were made to the wall head and roof towards the end of the 17th or early 18th century, in line with the changing fashion away from dormered attics, resulting in the creation of a full second storey and the basic outline of the main block as it exists today.

By at least the 1830s the frontage had been thoroughly remodelled in a Georgian manner. The Ordnance Survey memoirs of 1832 describe the buildings of High Street as having a modern and respectable appearance, and a further entry of 1839 notes that the majority of houses in the street were neat and three storeys high, singling out only the neighbouring Dobbin's Hotel as one of the original houses still in perfect preservation. The 1830s valuation book for Carrickfergus, unlike most comparable records for other areas, contains no building dimensions or other descriptive details. Map evidence shows, however, that sometime between 1832 and 1857 the stairwell return was enlarged to the southwest side. The central chimneys may also have been added during this period, though they could be earlier.

Ownership of number 10 appears to have remained with the Dobbin family until 1792, when the property was acquired from William and Catherine Dobbin by Sir William Kirk (died 1819), a prominent citizen who served several terms as Lord Mayor of Carrickfergus from the early 1780s until the 1810s. It is possible that Sir William resided here for a period before constructing his new mansion at Thornfield to the north of the town around 1797, though it is more likely that the property was let to a succession of tenants, as it was to remain for almost all of the following century and a half.

By 1860 the house was occupied by John W. S. Cole, followed by R. K. Bowman in 1863, a Miss Smith in 1878, and Reverend William Graham in 1882. Around 1892 it was leased to Dr Samuel Killen (died 1914), described as a physician and surgeon, who is recorded in the 1901 and 1911 censuses as living there with his wife Mary, their four children, and a housekeeper. Number 10 remained the Killen family home until 1949, and may also have served as a surgery for much of this time, as one of Samuel's sons, also a doctor, was living here in the 1940s. During the Killen family's tenure, a pair of full-height gabled bay windows — which appear to have been added to the front before 1884, and possibly before 1861 — were removed and the present window arrangement installed. Photographic evidence suggests this was carried out around 1900, though it is not recorded in the valuation records.

In 1951 the property was sold by Mrs Eileen Beatrice Grove, a descendant of Sir William Kirk, to Thomas McVea of Rocklands, Carrickfergus. Mr McVea converted the ground floor to a hardware shop and added a large extension to the rear either at that time or later in the 1950s or early 1960s. It may have been at this stage that the staircase was altered and access to the first floor moved to its current position. At some point between then and 1967 the former carriage entrance to the eastern side was converted into a separate shop unit, with a rear extension created out of much of the wedge-shaped gap between the larger hardware store addition and the neighbouring property to the east. Sometime between around 1965 and around 1984 the two central chimneystacks were removed. In 1979 the remaining land at the rear, which had been partly occupied by outbuildings, was sold off and most of the structures subsequently demolished. The property now known as numbers 10a and 10b was sold to a relative of the present owner in 1984. Around this time the main shop became a chemist's, and later an estate agent's. At some subsequent point this shop itself was subdivided, with the new unit at the west end and all of the first floor most recently used as a hairdressing salon, while access to the uppermost floor — which appears to have been used only for storage since 1951 — became practically cut off.