Survey Data
Reg No
11810033
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Historical, Social
Original Use
School
Date
1905 - 1915
Coordinates
267008, 219522
Date Recorded
12/06/2002
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Detached four-bay single-storey former national school, dated 1910, on a T-shaped plan with two-bay single-storey gabled projecting porch to centre. Extended, c.1980, comprising single-bay single-storey (incomplete) lower return to rear to north-east. Now disused. Gable-ended roofs on a T-shaped plan with slate. Red clay ridge tiles. Yellow brick chimney stacks. Rendered coping to gables. No roof to return to north-east. Roughcast walls. Unpainted. Cut-stone dressings including supporting stones to gables. Cut-stone date stone/plaque. Exposed concrete block walls to return. Square-headed openings. Rendered sills. Now boarded-up. Pair of square-headed door openings to porch. Tongue-and-groove timber panelled doors. Set back from road in own grounds. Rubble stone boundary wall to front with rendered piers having wrought iron gate.
Appraisal
Rathangan National School (former) is a fine, small-scale building of the early twentieth century that was built to the designs of the Board of Works on behalf of the Board of Education. Of considerable social and historic significance the school was built to address the educational needs of the town and replaced the former schoolhouse to south-east (11810029/KD-17-10-29). Although built on the simplest of plans comprising a pair of classrooms with a central porch, the school is afforded much presence through the use of tall window openings, which are now boarded up. The internal arrangement of the school is also of social interest, representing a practise established in the Victorian period that segregated pupils by gender (as identified by the separate entrances to the porch). Now disused and in the early stages of dereliction, the school retains most of its original character, with some important original features intact including the timber furniture to the door openings and the covering to the roof. Set back slightly from the line of the road the school is an attractive component of the streetscape of Leinster Street, flanking the approach road in to Rathangan from the north-west.