Gates And Railings, Gatepiers, Boundary Walls, Former Dalmore School Including Ancillary Building, West Stirling Street

This is a well-detailed, tall single-story, 7-bay former Infant School, built in 1885-6 by John Melvin and Son, located close to open parkland on the main road into Alva. The building is of Gothic design, arranged in an H-plan, and retains much of its original interior detail and unaltered plan form.

The school is constructed of squared and snecked rock-faced pink sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings, a base course, and eaves cornice. The symmetrical principal elevation faces south, featuring a traceried window in the centre gabled bay which includes a bellcote. Large flanking bays have part-glazed double doors and timber doors beyond. The doorway on the right is a shouldered arch with a two-leaf boarded timber door and plate glass fanlight within an angled gabled porch. The left doorway is a single-panelled timber door with fanlight under a consoled canopy. Outer gabled bays each feature a large traceried window and the base of a truncated stack on each gablehead.

Original leaded diamond-pattern and small pane glazing is present throughout the top hopper and casement windows, with some coloured glazing to the top lights of the traceried windows. All windows are boarded. The roof is covered with small gray slates, decorative terracotta ridge tiles, and slate-hung pagoda-type bases for the ridge ventilators. Ashlar and harl stacks are present, some of which are truncated. Stepped, coped ashlar skewputts have moulded details, and decorative cast iron downpipes are fitted with rainwater hoppers. Two undamaged griffins and their fixings remain.

The interior retains decorative details including architraved, panelled timber doors, boarded timber dadoes with built-in wall cupboards, dado rails with ironwork coat hooks and decorative cast iron radiators. The original plan form has been maintained, comprising two large outer classrooms running north-south, each with sliding panelled timber dividing doors in the centre. A larger room runs east-west, with a timber floor and a hammerbeam-type roof. All three rooms have boarded timber ceilings and circular decorative cast iron ventilators. A narrow linking corridor at the rear has a pointed-arch ceiling and decoratively detailed cast iron radiators.

An ancillary building is a rectangular-plan playground shelter with a steeply pitched slated piend roof supported by cast iron columns, now infilled with brick.

The site is enclosed by semicircular- and saddleback-coped rubble boundary walls, some with inset ironwork railings. Two pairs of pyramidally-coped, square-section ashlar gatepiers mark the entrance on the south side; the western pair retains an ironwork gate.