Former schoolhouse

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Small, formal, single-storey hipped-roof schoolhouse of 1849, now in use as a hall. The building is set on gently sloping ground on the E side of Richmount Road, on the eastern fringe of the recently much-developed village of Scotch Street, about 4.4km NW of Portadown town centre.

The building is L-shaped in plan with a a symmetrical (NW-facing) front with large, central gabled porch, and a small lean-to extension to the rear. The walls are largely finished in painted roughcast with a tall smooth render base course and the overhanging roof is covered in natural (Welsh) slate, as is the roof of the porch - which also has plain timber bargeboards. There is a single rendered chimneystack roughly to centre of the main roof.

The windows, which are relatively large and set at a high level, are mainly flat-arched and filled with replacement PVC frames. The porch has a segmental-headed entrance with replacement timber double-leaf door with small segmental-headed windows to the porch sides. Above the entrance is a recently inserted (?slate) panel which reads ‘Richmount Old School’. To the rear there is a small, recently-added lean-to. The RW goods are a combination of cast-iron and PVC.

The eastern corner of building is abutted by a single-storey structure, which appears to belong to the neighbouring property to the N.

The ground immediately around the building (consisting mainly of a forecourt to the W and S) is largely covered in uneven stones. Modern vehicle gate to W. Small former toilet block to the E boundary with pebbledash / roughcast walls and mono-pitch roof.

Historical information

Scotch Street, said to have been founded by Scots settlers, is shown as a small rural settlement around a complicated junction of five roads on the OS map of 1834-35, and described in the contemporary OS Memoirs as consisting of ‘a few houses…a Methodist meeting house and a school.’

The school, which had been established in or shortly prior to 1820, was located in ‘a stone cottage, roughcast and slated’, which map evidence suggests stood a short distance to south of this site, at the north end of a row of buildings that fronted directly on to the present Richmount Road. Sometime between 1831 and 1835 it became part of the National School System.

In 1849 this schoolhouse was constructed to replace the old building. The new school, largely funded by landlord, Lord Lurgan, was sited on what was then the north side of the Portadown-Moy road at the intersection of the with Richmount Road. It is shown on the 1860 OS map with an additional return extending to the rear and two small freestanding structures to the immediate north and south of this. An August 1859 advertisement for a schoolmaster and schoolmistress mentions ‘a dwelling house, three acres of land and half an acre of bog attached to the school’. Presumably the master’s / mistress’s residence was within the return shown on the 1860 map, but this is not certain. The 1905 OS map shows the school without the return, but there is a separate building at a slightly greater distance to the north (roughly on the site of the present house at no.4 Richmount Road) accessed by its own drive; this was undoubtedly the master’s house recorded in the valuations for the first time in 1884, and must have replaced the quarters within the former return.

At some point before 1860 the Portadown-Moy road was redirected further northwards along its present line, and the small settlement of Scotch Street itself gradually shifted northwestwards as a result. The old road itself was grassed over and part of this land became part of the grounds of the school.

The building remained in use as a school (latterly 'Richmount Primary School') until 1963, when it was superseded by the present school along Moy Road. Since then it has served as a hall. The building was refurbished in c.2019 when PVC windows were installed and a small extension added to the rear.

References - Primary sources
1 OS maps, 1834-35, 1860, 1905, c.1920, 1953-56, 1965, c.1969
2 OS Memoirs, 1835
3 ‘Portadown News’, 3 August 1859, p.3
4 PRONI VAL12B/14/2B, valuation book 1878-91
5 ‘Belfast Telegraph’, 11 June 1960, p.7

Secondary sources
6 https://www.richmountprimary.co.uk/school-history/ [accessed 12.05.2021]

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Small single-storey schoolhouse of 1849 somewhat compromised by a c.2019 refurbishment.