Offwell School

SY 19 NE 3/113 22.2.55

OFFWELL OFFWELL Offwell School

GV II

School. Built in 1840 by the Reverend Edward Copleston, Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St Pauls. Blocks of squared flint laid to courses with Beerstone detail (the west end wall is plastered and so too might have been the rest originally); stone stack with a Beerstone ashlar narrow octagonal chimneyshaft; slate roof, maybe thatch originally. Plan: small 1-room plan school built up on a terrace above the road and facing south. Front doorway with porch at the right (east) end. A second room across the back in an integral leanto and behind that a secondary cloakroom. The school is single storey. Tudor Gothic style. Exterior: regular but not symmetrical 2-window front of tall Beerstone mullion and transom window with hoodmoulds. The gabled porch at the right end has a 2-centred outer arch with a ribbon plaque above inscribed as follows: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom". The front doorway itself is a plainer 2-centred arch and it contains a plank door. The roof is gable-ended with shaped kneelers and coping. The left gable is surmounted by the chimneyshaft and the right gable is surmounted by a gabled bellcote. The right (east) end contains 2 more mullion and transom windows with hoodmoulds, the right one (to the leanto) is smaller. Above the larger left one is a plaque containing a bishops head in a quatrefoil panel and its hoodmould has carved human head label stops. There is another similar carved plaque in the left end. Interior: not inspected. In front of the school the terrace is revetted by a flint rubble wall with plain coping surmounted by C20 railings. The gate posts are Beerstone ashlar; they are square in section with pyramid caps. The school forms a group with other listed buildings in the centre of Offwell, most of them built by Bishop Copleston.

Listing NGR: SY1952599635