Chapel of St. Mary the Immaculate Mother of God, St Colman’s College, Violet Hill, 46 Armagh Road, Newry, Co Down, BT35 6PP

Chapel of St. Mary the Immaculate Mother of God at St Colman's College

A chapel aligned north-south in stripped Romanesque revival style with Art Deco overtones, dating from the mid-twentieth century. It consists of a nave of five and a half bays with a lower sacristy attached. The chapel joins the main school building at right angles to its left-hand gable, projecting forward by three bays of the nave.

The building is constructed of load-bearing masonry with a three-course stepped plinth of reconstituted stone. The walls are rusticated red facing brick in English Garden wall bond, employing three different brick types used randomly, with openings, quoins, copings, parapets and other embellishments in precast reconstituted stone. The pitched natural slate roof of the nave is flanked by flat asphalt roofs to the lower aisles. Rainwater goods throughout are cast iron, with hoppers featuring a floral design on their faces.

The three north aisle windows have semicircular heads dressed with reconstituted stone, as do the three clerestory windows. A semicircular headed window sits in the end of the north aisle. The aisles and sacristy are topped with brick parapets coped in reconstituted stone, except over the north aisle where the parapet is formed by a pierced balustrade of reconstituted stone creating a balcony accessible from the school library and chapel gallery.

The ecclesiastical east gable of the nave (rear wall of the sanctuary) is coped in reconstituted stone with a finial cross and a larger cross built into the brickwork below. The ecclesiastical west wall mirrors this treatment and features a rose window in reconstituted stone arranged in two radiating stages: the inner in four segments and the outer in eight.

The sacristy to the south of the sanctuary comprises three bays with a stepped profile—the central bay has a pitched roof while the flanking bays are roofed as the aisles. A lower sacristy abuts at ground floor, with its central bay advanced and gabled, displaying a figure of Christ holding a bunch of lilies in the apex. Each bay has a single semicircular headed window. Above the sacristy roof, in the ecclesiastical east wall of the ecclesiastical south aisle, is a semicircular headed window containing a pair of semicircular headed lights. The ecclesiastical south aisle is detailed identically to the north.

The most striking architectural element is the bell tower rising against the ecclesiastical north wall of the gable in three distinct stages. The first stage features a single tall lancet window on both the ecclesiastical east and north faces, glazed with two vertical rows of leaded quarries, with shouldered buttresses strengthening the corners to two-thirds of its height. The second stage has a triple bell vent on each face, each vent semicircular headed and dressed in reconstituted stone, as are the base, quoins and coping. The third stage is reduced in plan and entirely octagonal, also in reconstituted stone, crowned by a two-stage octagonal lantern surmounted by a finial cross, all in reconstituted stone.