Former schoolhouse, 4 Richmount Road, Scotch Street, Portadown, County Armagh, BT62 4JA

Former Schoolhouse at 4 Richmount Road, Scotch Street, Portadown

A small, single-storey schoolhouse built in 1849, now used as a hall. The building sits on gently sloping ground on the eastern side of Richmount Road, on the eastern fringe of Scotch Street village, approximately 4.4 kilometres north-west of Portadown town centre.

The schoolhouse is L-shaped in plan with a symmetrical north-west-facing front featuring a large central gabled porch. A small lean-to extension extends to the rear. The walls are largely finished in painted roughcast with a tall smooth render base course. The overhanging roof is covered in natural Welsh slate, as is the porch roof, which has plain timber bargeboards. A single rendered chimneystack sits roughly at the centre of the main roof.

The windows are relatively large and set at a high level, mostly with flat arches and filled with replacement PVC frames. The porch has a segmental-headed entrance with a replacement timber double-leaf door and small segmental-headed windows to either side. Above the entrance is a recently inserted slate panel reading "Richmount Old School". To the rear is a small recently-added lean-to. Rainwater goods are a combination of cast iron and PVC. The eastern corner of the building is abutted by a single-storey structure belonging to the neighbouring property to the north. The ground immediately around the building, consisting mainly of a forecourt to the west and south, is largely covered in uneven stones. A modern vehicle gate stands to the west. A small former toilet block with pebbledash and roughcast walls and mono-pitch roof stands on the east boundary.

Scotch Street was founded by Scots settlers and appears on the 1834–35 Ordnance Survey map as a small rural settlement around a complicated junction of five roads. The 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs describe it as comprising "a few houses…a Methodist meeting house and a school." The school had been established in or shortly before 1820, housed in "a stone cottage, roughcast and slated" located a short distance to the south of this site at the north end of a row of buildings fronting Richmount Road. Between 1831 and 1835 it became part of the National School System. The current schoolhouse was constructed in 1849 to replace the old building, largely funded by the landlord, Lord Lurgan. It was sited on what was then the north side of the Portadown–Moy road at its intersection with Richmount Road. The 1860 Ordnance Survey map shows it with an additional return extending to the rear and two small freestanding structures immediately to the north and south. An August 1859 advertisement for a schoolmaster and schoolmistress mentions "a dwelling house, three acres of land and half an acre of bog attached to the school." The dwelling house was presumably within the return shown on the 1860 map, though this is not certain. The 1905 Ordnance Survey map shows the school without the return, but there is a separate building at a slightly greater distance to the north, roughly on the site of the present house at number 4 Richmount Road, accessed by its own drive. This was undoubtedly the master's house, recorded in valuations for the first time in 1884, and must have replaced the quarters within the former return.

At some point before 1860 the Portadown–Moy road was redirected further northwards along its present line, and the settlement of Scotch Street itself gradually shifted north-westwards as a result. The old road was grassed over and part of this land became part of the school grounds.

The building remained in use as a school, latterly as Richmount Primary School, until 1963, when it was superseded by the present school on Moy Road. Since then it has served as a hall. The building was refurbished around 2019 when PVC windows were installed and a small extension added to the rear.