Abbots View, Bell Tower, Chantry, Chapter House, Cloisters, Matins, Monks Retreat, Vespers At Wood Barton

Monastery, now apartments, at Woodleigh, comprising a range of connected buildings and a separate church. Built 1902-4 by the architectural practice Scoles and Raymond for a Trappist community that had relocated from France.

The monastery range is constructed of yellow and brown local stone with grey and red stone from Plymouth, with yellow brick and granite dressings and a clay tile roof. New brickwork, such as window architraves, comes from Derby. The internal granite staircases are supported by reinforced concrete, with pitch pine handrails and steel balusters. Roof timbers are pitch pine.

The building is L-shaped in plan, with the monastery range running on an East-West axis with cross-wings at each end. The structure is now subdivided into eight apartments. The church stands to the south-west on a North-South axis.

The monastery range rises two storeys plus attic and basement, arranged in a 2:9:2 bay pattern on its north face. The end bays form slightly projecting gabled cross-wings. A stone plinth and low stone buttresses support the walls. Doorways and windows have segmental-headed yellow brick dressings and are fitted with four-pane sashes, though some large round-arch doorways with fanlights are modern replacements. The south elevation features a catslide roof between the cross-wings, six gabled dormers, and a bell turret.

The former church is attached at right-angles to the west cross-wing. It is a large timber-clad building with east and west aisles, two-light cusped Gothic windows, and a clerestorey with straight-headed windows. The chancel has a narrower clerestorey and a three-light window in the north gable-end.

The interior of the monastery range is austere, with walls of bare brick or new plaster, and timber floors and cills. Granite staircases at either end have iron balustrades with pitch pine handrails. A pine collar-rafter roof with iron ties spans the building. The church interior contains a seven-bay nave with an inserted swimming pool, jacuzzi and sauna at the chancel end. Narrow aisles and tall pointed-arch arcades, all in timber, flank the nave. The roof is supported on lattice-girder trusses and retains early twentieth-century painted decoration at the chancel end.

The monastery was built by a Trappist community fleeing anti-Catholic legislation of the French Third Republic. The monks adapted and extended existing buildings on the estate. The pre-fabricated timber church was designed by Dom Mellet and based on the chapter house at Solesmes in France, the community's original home. The church was first built at Appuldurcombe, Isle of Wight, in 1903, then moved to Quarr in 1908 before its final relocation to Woodleigh in 1912.

The architects Scoles and Raymond were prominent practitioners of early twentieth-century Catholic church design. Canon Alexander Joseph Cory Scoles (1844-1920) was the third son of Joseph John Scoles (1798-1863), an influential nineteenth-century Gothic church architect and founding fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The monastery was vacated in 1914 with the outbreak of World War One. Few monks returned to Wood Barton after 1918, and the community closed in 1921. A period of disuse followed, with possible military occupation during the 1940s. After World War Two, the estate was converted to farming use, and the monastery buildings underwent adaptation accordingly.

The adjacent house to the north, known as Wood Barton Farm and listed separately, retains some sixteenth-century structure and was formerly the family seat of the Fortescue family.