Methodist Church, High Street, Newtownbutler, Co. Fermanagh, BT92 8JD

Methodist Church, High Street, Newtownbutler

An early 19th-century Methodist Church prominently located by the roadside in Newtownbutler village. The building retains considerable internal character with many original features intact, though its setting is compromised by the location of the police station directly behind.

The church is L-shaped and aligned north-south on the west side of High Street. It has a pitched natural slate roof with tiled skews and a cement-rendered chimney projecting from the east gable of the east elevation. Half-round metal rainwater goods are fitted throughout. The walls are lined and cement-rendered with stepped quoins over a slightly advanced base course.

Windows are predominantly semi-circular headed lancets with stone cills. The south gable is abutted to the left of centre by a large projecting entrance porch, which due to topography drops to a driveway at lower ground level. The exposed section of the porch is blank. The south face contains two 4/5 sliding sash lancets with Y-tracery heads. The east cheek of the porch contains a door of four diagonally sheeted panels with a semi-circular traceried fanlight over, set in a stone surround with keyblocked head and accessed by two stone steps. The west cheek is blank.

The east elevation is abutted to the right by a full-height gabled transept, now containing a Sunday school and detailed as church. The exposed left section of the nave has two timber Y-traceried windows set in keyblocked stone surrounds. The transept gable has two lancets in plain reveals. The left cheek contains a diagonally sheeted timber door to the left and a lancet to the right. The north elevation has two lancets. The north gable of the nave has three windows, the central one being taller, sharing a common cill. The west elevation has two equally spaced windows matching those on the east elevation.

A plaque inlaid into the boundary wall to the south of the entrance reads "The / Primitive Wesleyan / Methodist / Preaching House / Erected / 1834". The setting includes a paved area to the east raised over a cement-rendered boundary wall forming the base course of the transept gable and enclosed by modern metal railing. The paved area is reached by eleven stone steps and is enclosed to the south by a stepped cement-rendered boundary wall with saddle coping. Access is via a decorative cast-iron gate with maker's mark reading "McIlroy / York Street / Belfast", supported on square-section chamfered sandstone piers with shallow pyramidal coping.

According to the Ordnance Survey Memoir, the church was founded in 1834 by a breakaway group from the Methodist congregation which had a meeting house elsewhere in the town. It could accommodate 450 people and was styled Primitive Wesleyan. The building is shown as Methodist Meeting House on the 1834 and 1857 Ordnance Survey 6-inch maps and as Methodist Church on the 1907 edition.