Cartmel Quaker Meeting House with gighouse/stable and enclosing walls

Cartmel Quaker Meeting House with Stable, Gig House and Enclosing Walls

This Quaker Meeting House was built in 1859 to designs by Alfred Waterhouse. The stable, gig house and perimeter walls date from the same year. The meeting house underwent minor 20th-century alterations to its attic and front wall.

The building is constructed of stone finished in rough-cast render with rusticated limestone dressings, beneath a graduated green-slate roof and cast-iron rainwater goods.

The meeting house follows a T-shaped plan, set towards the rear centre of a rectangular plot. It comprises an entrance lobby (with the now-enclosed gallery stairs and a WC to the east), a kitchen to the north, and the meeting room to the west. An L-shaped stable and gig house, incorporating a WC, occupies the south-east corner of the plot.

The meeting house is a single-storey stone-built structure under a pitched roof with overhanging eaves. The main north elevation contains four bays separated by stepped buttresses. The western three bays each have a tall segmental-headed window of four lights with a hopper vent at the top, lighting the meeting room. The fourth bay to the east is occupied by a gabled and buttressed porch with overhanging eaves. The porch features a semi-circular outer doorway and a recessed, octagonal stone panel above carved with the date 1859. The threshold is flanked on either side by a cast-iron boot scraper. The right return wall is blind, while the left return has a single tall round-arched window to the first floor and three small fixed-pane ground-floor windows. The rear elevation has swept eaves with a later small lean-to attached. The south rear elevation is similarly detailed to the north.

The detached stable and gig house is a single-storey stone-built structure with quoins, under pitched roofs hipped to the east end of the stable, finished in graduated green-slate. The gig house is an open-fronted shed with an entrance through the rear wall, attached to a rectangular stable with a boarded door with fanlight above and a window in the east wall. A WC is attached to the west end.

The porch interior has a stone-flagged floor and an inner segmental-headed doorway fitted with a six-panelled door. Beyond this lies a narrow lobby with an original diagonally-laid red and black tiled floor, four-panelled doors to adjoining rooms, cast-iron coat hooks, fitted cupboards and shelving. The lobby ceiling is stepped to accommodate the gallery above. The full-height meeting room has a panelled dado with plastered walls above and a suspended ceiling. The ministers' stand against the west wall retains two levels of fitted benches with panelled backs and shaped arm rests and a front rail. All panels to the dado, doors and the stand are of chamfered mid-19th-century form. The pine floor is carpeted. The east gallery was blocked off in the mid-20th century by the insertion of a full-height partition. The original meeting room roof structure is retained above the inserted ceiling, with the feet of the arched braces to the trusses visible below, and chamfered purlins visible in the gallery. The plain pine staircase to the gallery is enclosed by later partitions and has no balustrade. The plaster walls here and in the lobby are lined to resemble ashlar. The stable and gig house interior has a cobbled floor, lime-washed walls and a pine roof structure. One of two original pine-boarded stall partitions remains, the second represented only by a front post. One stall retains a wooden manger attached to the wall, and a second stall retains manger mortices. The interior of the WC could not be inspected.

The rectangular site is enclosed by limestone walls with alternating flat and upright stone copings (cock and hen copings). The front wall features a pair of swept double entrances fitted with modern steel gates, flanked by re-sited original rusticated stone gate piers with caps.