Trinity Free Church, Bridgegate, Irvine

Trinity Free Church, Bridgegate, Irvine

Designed by Frederick Thomas Pilkington in 1863, this is a romantic gothic church with Venetian inspiration, featuring a spire and adjoining hall. The building occupies a steeply falling site down towards the River Irvine, organised in a compact, rippling plan. It is constructed in bull-faced coursed rubble with contrasting stugged dressings and red sandstone ashlar band courses with alternating voussoirs. The hall employs plainer treatment without the red sandstone detailing. Pointed arch openings punctuate the elevations throughout. Much-weathered foliaceous carving adorns the surfaces. Steeply pitched stone finialled gables feature polychrome 'sunburst' masonry beneath steep roofs.

The west (entrance) elevation presents a substantial battered gabled bay to the right with a tower and spire recessed to the left, and a gabled porch set in a re-entrant angle. A stone porch rests on a squat red sandstone column with an apparently uncarved block capital, flanked to the right by a banded pier with leaf carving and sandstone cusping to the arch. A stone balcony above the porch displays an indented trefoil motif. Paired doors feature heavy block capitals overhanging a central pier. The tower incorporates heavy corner buttresses to the squat first stage, battered with ashlar coping rising to a polygonal stone spire banded with contrasting fishscale masonry. Corner pinnacles on red sandstone colonnettes with cusped arches sit between steeply gabled louvred lucarnes with pointed arch cusp-bipartite openings and quatrefoils in the arch-heads. The gable to the right is symmetrical, featuring at ground level a loggia with a broader, taller central arch on banded squat columns flanked by smaller paired openings, each with central red sandstone columns and decoratively carved contrasting capitals. Two windows above are deeply recessed paired, cusped openings with cinquefoils in the gableheads and sawtooth-coped ashlar steeply sloping cills. An Italianate wheel window is set within a recessed pointed arch panel supported by squat capitalised colonnettes and a corbelled arch, with decoratively carved ornament to the boss, surround and contrasting sandstone spokes.

The north elevation displays a broad canted 'transept' projection to the centre, its taller centre gable decoratively corbelled to the gablehead with a vesica. A three-light colonnetted window sits under the eaves to the left, with corbelled colonnettes flanking a deep-set door in an advanced stone doorpiece. The tower rises to the right with a further colonnette-flanked door on the return to the east at ground level. A North European style polygonal 'bell-tower' with a battered base features fishscale slates to a polygonal roof, a decoratively boarded shaft, and a polygonally capped bell chamber at the apex. The adjoining hall extends at right angles to the north.

The south elevation presents a canted opposing transept with two bays of three-light windows to the right and a taller gable breaking the eaves to the centre, detailed as the opposite bays on the north elevation, with a further three-light window to the left. Beyond these bays the steep west gable returns with irregular openings including an entrance to the loggia.

Some window openings have been blinded. Windows are glazed with plate glass without cases, set direct into stone in the manner of Alexander Thomson. The roof is covered with graded grey slates and fishscale slates to the bell chamber roof. Two-leaf boarded doors feature distinctive Pilkingtonian scallop-carved detailing. Stone stacks rise at the angle of the east gable and to the left flank of the canted bays on the south elevation.

The interior features high windows and a centrally-oriented space articulated by four ornately carved stone columns, each different, supporting in-canted sections of the rippling plan with finely carved capitals. Fittings have been partly removed for community centre use. Polychrome voussoirs light the colonnette-mullioned openings and blind recesses. Plain shaped stone and decoratively carved corbels support a fine open timber roof with barleysugar carving to the queenposts. Chevron boarded doors and a gallery front with barleysugar posts complete the scheme. Stained glass lights the wheel window.

The adjoining hall is a gabled rectangular-plan structure with a pyramidally-roofed, louvred birdcage bellcote to the ridge. The southwest elevation features three-light windows with a gabled stone porch to the left, entered from the left return, and a depressed arch doorway. Paired lancets to the northwest gable have a cusped vesica in the gablehead. Plate glass glazing is employed throughout. A stack rises to the southeast gablehead. The interior has a facetted barrel roof. Grey slates cover the roof.

Sturdy, squat bull-faced stone piers with truncated pyramidal caps flank the path ascending to the church from Bridgegate. A coped bull-faced wall lines the path to the church. Wrought-iron railings with floriate cast-iron finials mark stages along the approach.