Outbuilding And Store Attached To The Decoy

ST 76 NW 146/4/248 03-APR-90

CHARLCOMBE WOOLLEY LANE (West,off) OUTBUILDING AND STORE ATTACHED TO THE DECOY (Formerly listed as: WOOLLEY LANE OUTBUILDING AND STORE ATTACHED TO ROSE COTTAGE) II

Former gunpowder works building and store (probably refining house and saltpetre store), now outbuilding. Mid C18; altered C19 and C20. Rubble-stone with stone dressings, outbuilding with pantile roof, store largely underground with red brick vault. Outbuilding one storey, 5 bays, with store at left end, projecting forward. Quoined doorway at left end with a window on its left; similar wider doorway with chamfered, round-cornered, lintel and board door at right end with inserted small-pane window on its right; between these 2 original doorways a former long, 6-light window with stone surround and flat-faced mullions, the lights now blocked and at right end a large doorway inserted. Store, projecting at left end, has quoined doorway with chamfered lintel in re-entrant angle. Rear: outbuilding has top of a quoined doorway on right and traces of other original openings; various inserted openings.

Interior: outbuilding has large-scantling cross-beams; principal rafter roof trusses, square-sectioned diagonally-set ridge-piece, through purlins, old rafters. Store has barrel vault, quoined at entrance. These buildings served the Woolley Gunpowder Works which operated from the 1720s to c.1803.

HISTORY: Gunpowder was manufactured on this site from the 1720s until c1803, after which it reverted to agricultural use. It was the first of three in Somerset which were started to supply local mining interests and also foreign markets through the port of Bristol, and all of which closed by the mid-C19. These sites, of which Littleton is the best preserved, provide evidence of the dispersion of gunpowder making away from the South East during the C18.

B J Buchanan and M T Tucker, "The Manufacture of Gunpowder: a study of the documentary and physical evidence relating to the Woolley Powder Works near Bath", Industrial Archaeology Review, V, 3, Autumn 1981, pp 185-202; Brenda Buchanan, "The Technology of Gunpowder Making in the Eighteenth Century: Evidence from the Bristol Region", Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 67 (1995-6).

Listing NGR: ST7494368791