The existing building consisted of:
• one almost square 'box' – the chapel (right) – aligned with the points of the compass
• another 'box' – the cottage and stable for a horse or donkey (left) – the same length, but half the width, ranged along its west side and shunted a couple of paces north
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The interior of the chapel on our first visit in August.
Left: looking north towards the pulpit. Right: looking south towards the main door
The chapel was a simple, full-height space with no gallery.
The walls were panelled to dado level and rows of North American pitch-pine pews were set into a slightly raked floor with their backs to the main south door and looking down towards the focal point against the north wall – the low, decorated screen and pulpit.
Just inside the main door there was a small vestibule having a window with borders of stained-glass (no religious connotations) in the centre and two doors opening sideways onto the two aisles.
The two tall arched windows in both south and north walls looked at first glance to be identical, but in fact they were made at different times, had different detailing and were of different dimensions
The chapel porch, August, 1997
Left: Chapel/North. Middle: Cottage/West. Right: Cottage South
The main walls are
all of gorgeous stone, but different shapes and sizes of stones have been used at different times and they have been layed in several different styles on east, west, north and south elevations
Chapel upper windows/South
The courses on the south side are much longer, thinner and more uniform than elsewhere. The two upper windows are capped by a concrete lintel, which was a later modification (probably in the 1950s). Originally the two windows were of the same design as the lower ones, having arches at the top and quatrefoil shapes, but something caused these to be removed and filled in (you can probably just see the lack of continuity in the courses of stone above the lintel, now you know that). The two wedge-shaped keystones from these windows now adorn the garden and some of the slightly chamfered blue bricks which previously lined the arches have been used to sonstruct the chimneypiece on the cottage (Conventionally chamfered bricks would not be used in a normal wall.)
Chapel/East, August, 1997
Roll the cursor over the image (above) to highlight the large stones
The east wall in particular is a mixture – there are some courses of larger stones, which are beautiful, but they obliged us to put our new doorways where they could go, rather than precisely where we may have drawn them on the plans