Historic Building Details

HB Ref No:
HB06/02/071

Address :
St Patricks ((C of I) parish church The Cloney Glenarm Ballymena Co Antrim BT44 0AB

Townland:
Cloney

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Survey 2:
B+

Date of Listing:
23/10/1979 00:00:00

Date of De-listing:

Current Use:
Church

Former Use
Church

Conservation Area:
Yes

Industrial Archaeology:
No

Vernacular:
No

Thatched:
No

Monument:
Yes

Derelict:
No

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OS Map No:
45/8

IG Ref:
D3104 1531

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Owner Category

Church - C of I

Exterior Description And Setting

Relatively simple, largely rendered, single storey gothic (C of I) church of 1763-69 with tower and spire and slightly awkward 19th century additions including; a chancel, gabled front porch, double gabled organ / choir ‘transept’ and a squat asymmetric pitched roof vestry. The church is sited on the north side of The Cloney Road, to the west side of the mouth of the Glenarm River. The building, which is the earliest known example of Strawberry Hill " gothick" in an ecclesiastical structure in Ireland, stands on the site of a Franciscan friary of 1465. The ruins of part of the friary can still be seen in the graveyard to the west side of the church. The tower is to the S gable. To the E face of the tower is a gabled porch (added 1878), in squared basalt rubble with sandstone dressings. To the E face of this is a gothic arch headed opening which is framed with ¾ pilasters with floral capitals and moulded archivolt, all in smooth sandstone. To the corners are small diagonal buttresses. The N face is blank while the S face has two (paired) gothic arch headed windows with smooth sandstone dressings and lattice panes. The three storey tower is finished in lined render and is topped with regular castellations and an octagonal spire of brick construction having a (presumably early 20th. C ) render finish. with small roundel openings along its length The exposed corners of the tower have reducing diagonal buttresses. The E face of the tower (above the porch) is blank at first floor level, while the second floor has an ogee arch headed opening with louvers and moulded surround. Fine moulded string courses mark the ground and second floor ceiling levels. To the S face of the tower there is a large pointed arch headed window (in sandstone) to the ground floor . This has a moulded dripstone with ‘carved head’ label stops which appear to depict kings and queens. The geometric tracery to the window has paired lancets with cusps surmounted with a ‘trefoil rose’. To the first floor is an ogee arch headed window opening with paired lancet windows. The second floor has a louvered opening as E face. Directly below the louvered opening is a blue enamelled circular clock face with gold painted Roman numerals and hands.( The clock is by Benson of Whitehaven and is dated. 1759 The bell dates to 1758.) The W face has a louvered opening to the second floor, as before, while the lower floors are blank. The gable of the church proper half overlaps the tower to this side (creating a boiler room at ground level and a store room to the first floor). The N face of the tower has a louvered opening to the second floor. The lower areas are obscured by the main gable. To exposed portion of the S gable to left (W) side of the tower, there is a pointed arch window to the first floor. The W main elevation of the nave has three pointed arched windows. As ground floor of S face of the tower To the far right is a plain ground level door ( to the boiler room) while to the left is a tall narrow lancet window with square headed drip moulding and label stops. To this side the nave is rendered, as the tower. To the centre of the N elevation is the gable of the chancel. The ridge to the chancel is slightly lower than the main roof and it is slightly narrower than main building. To the chancel gable there is a large pointed arch window with ‘double lancet’ tracery. The gable apex has a small stone Celtic styled cross. To the W face of the chancel there are two high level pointed arch windows with in-out sandstone dressings. The E face of the chancel has a window to the left, as W face. The chancel is finished in a dry dash with in-out sandstone quoins. The E elevation of the nave is mainly obscured by three projections. That to the right is the vestry. The N gable of this is asymmetric and finished in dry dash. Below the ridge is a paired of cusped windows. The E face is in squared basalt and is blank while the similarly finished S face has a flat arched door opening with a plain timber sheeted door. To the left is the doubled gable ‘choir / organ transept’. The right gable has a small centred gothic arched window. The gable to the left is larger and has a centred pointed arch window (in sandstone) with geometric tracery. The S face of this projection has a tall narrow flat arch window. To the left of this window, the coursing of the stonework suggests the one-time presence of an ogee arched doorway. At the junction of the main wall and the transept projection is a stone chimney stack. To the exposed section of the nave façade to left of the transept there is a large pointed arch window, similar to that on left gable of the transept itself. To upper left of this is a small gabled half-dormer with pointed arch window. The roof is slated. Cast iron rw goods. The boundary to the road side is formed with decorative cast iron railings. The church is sited within its own small graveyard, with graves to the W and N. To the W also is the remains of part of the 15th century friary (the church appears to have been built on a large part of the ruin itself). The earliest headstones the writers observed were mid 18th century. To the S (roadside) boundary of the churchyard there is a low stone wall with decorative (probably late 19th century) railings. This wall includes a gateway with gates similar to the railings and square stone piers with pyramidal caps.

Architects

Close, Samuel P

Historical Information

This (C of I) parish church was built between c.1763 and 1769 and is the earliest known example of the gothick style in an ecclesiastical building in Ireland. It replaced a pre 1683 church which originally stood on the site of the ‘schoolhouse’ on the south side of Castle Street, a church which by the 1750s was ‘ruinous and cannot be repaired without such yearly expenses as they [the congregation] cannot well bear’. Work on the new church appears to have started in early 1763, the majority of it undertaken by a stonemason named William McBride, who was instructed to ‘build the stone work…furnishing the stone and mortar at his own expense…[and to] build the walls of the said church at four shillings [to] the mason perch without any regard to the thickness of the wall…’, with the Earl of Antrim agreeing to ‘furnish barrows, mortar boxes and scaffolding materials etc (to…the foundations of the church be properly laid out), and also to pay ten pounds sterl to the said McBride at the laying the foundations of the said church and twenty pounds more when the work is ready for the laying on the window sills and the remainder when the stone work is built and ready fro the rooff’. At the end of July of that year McBride had completed the walls as far as sill level, and by March 1764 13,000 slates had been delivered by a James Menarey (at a cost of 18 shillings per 1,000). The church was finally consecrated in 1769.Some documents mistakenly state that the spire was a later addition. Vestry minutes goind back to 1720 refer to the spire. These minutes describe the building of 1763 as having a tower, spire, nave and small chancelwhich had slanted sides. The building appears to have remained in its 1760s form until 1822 when the spire was rebuilt and the church itself ‘enlarged’, at a cost of £1,200- £300 provided by the Board of First Fruits and Tenths. It is uncertain what this ‘enlargement’ actually entailed, but a large section of the transept to the east side is shown on the OS map of 1832 (originally the Antrim family pew). The OS Memoirs of 1830 describe the building as ‘very fine…in good repair and very well fitted up’, with a further report of 1835 referring to it as ‘plain and modern’, with a regular clock in the steeple, (signed ‘Benson of Whitehaven 1759’ -added to the church in 1806 by Sir Henry Vane), ‘neatly and comfortably fitted up internally’ and able to accommodate about 180 people. At this point the church also had a gallery. Thackery, writing in 1843, felt the building ‘grave looking’ but with a ‘beautiful steeple’. The OS map of 1857 shows a the church much as that of 1832, but with a small projection next to the transept. In 1876-78 the original chancel (a small hipped roof projection) was removed and replaced with a larger one, the transept enlarged and the small porch added to the east side of the tower. The nave windows were also enlarged, and, internally, the gallery was removed, the base of the tower converted to a baptistry and a new heating system installed. The present roof trusses may date from this time, but this is not certain. The architect responsible for these changes was S.P. Close, and the work carried out at a cost of over £600. The church stands on the site of a Franciscan friary, founded in 1465 by Alexander McDonnell and Robert McEoin Bisset. Initially escaping the dissolution of such houses in the 1530s and 40s, the friary appears to have continued in use some time after 1558, for, Edmond McKenna, a Franciscan writing in the 1640s, described serving there in ‘Queen Elizabeth’s reign’. By 1683, however, the site was in ruins. Much of the remaining walls were pulled down in the 1760s and the stone used for the building of the church itself. SMR No ANT29/6. References- Primary sources 1 PRONI D.2977/36/3/1A Antrim Papers Map, showing the Town of Glenarm, plus Glenarm Castle and demesne, by John O'Hara, 1779 2 Ulster Museum A view of Glenarm Castle (painting dating from some time between 1768 and 1812) 3 View of Glenarm ?c.1780 (painting in possession of Lord Dunluce) 4 Ulster Museum A view of Glenarm by John Nixon (1780s) [The church is shown in the foreground, with the original chancel.] 5 ‘Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland…’ vol.13 [c.1830-35] ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1992), p.127 6 PRONI OS/6/1/29/1 OS map, Co Antrim sh 29, 1832-33 7 PRONI VAL/1B/149 First valuation, Tickmacrevan parish, 1833 8 Samuel Lewis, ‘A topographical dictionary of Ireland’ vol.1 (London 1837), p.658 9 William Makepeace Thackery, ‘Irish sketchbook’ (1843), p.238 10 Mrs and Mrs S.C. Hall, ‘Ireland: Its scenery, character etc., vol.III (London 1843), p.130 11 PRONI VAL/2D/1/11 Valuation town plan of Glenarm, 1859 [with later annotations- ?c.1900] 12 PRONI VAL/2B/1/41B Second valuation [notebook], village of Glenarm, 1861 14 PRONI OS/8/103/1 OS town plan of Glenarm, 1903 15 PRONI VAL/12E/31/1 Valuation town plan of Glenarm, 1907-[1935] 16 PRONI VAL/3G/20/1 Valuation town plan of Glenarm. 1936-57 Secondary 1 H.A. Boyd, ‘The Parish of Tickmacrevan, County Antrim: an historical survey (Belfast 1954) 2 C.E.B. Brett, ‘Historic buildings…Glens of Antrim’ (Belfast 1971), p.14 3 Eileen Black, “A view of Glenarm Castle” in ‘The Glynns- Journal of The Glens of Antrim Historical Society’ vol.7 (1979), pp.29-30 4 Jimmie Irvine, “A map of Glenarm- 1779” in ‘The Glynns- Journal of The Glens of Antrim Historical Society’ vol.9 (1981), pp.52-61 5 Hon. Hector McDonnell, “The building of the parish church at Glenarm” in ‘The Glynns- Journal of The Glens of Antrim Historical Society’ vol.10 (1982), pp.31-36 6 Felix McKillop, ‘Glenarm- A local history’ (Glenarm 1987), pp.14-15, 27 7 C. Lynn and Hector McDonnell, ‘Glenarm Friary and the Bissets’ [Date not known] 8 Ann Dunlop Church Committee Secretary

Criteria for Listing

Architectural Interest

A. Style B. Proportion C. Ornamentation D. Plan Form G. Innovatory Qualities H-. Alterations detracting from building I. Quality and survival of Interior J. Setting

Historic Interest

Y. Social, Cultural or Economic Importance W. Northern Ireland/International Interest

Evaluation

Relatively simple, largely rendered, single storey gothic (C of I) church of 1760-69 with tower and spire and slightly awkward 19th century additions including, a gabled front porch, double gabled organ / choir ‘transept’, chancel, and a squat asymmetric pitched roof vestry. The building, which is the earliest known example of the use of gothick in an ecclesiastical structure in Ireland, stands on the site of a Franciscan friary of 1465.A steady evolution can be seen over the period since 1763. This along with its local historic significance and its Gothick distinction gives it sufficient distinction to merit the B+ grade.

General Comments

Date of Survey

03 April 2001