Penrose Almhouses

Between 1624 and 1627 Richard Beaple (1564-1643) and the four other co-executors of the will of his son-in-law John Penrose, Mayor of Barnstaple in 1620, built the large structure in Litchdon Street, Barnstaple, known today as Penrose's Almshouses. It consists of a cobbled courtyard around which are twenty almshouses, for forty poor residents, with chapel and board room and vegetable gardens behind. A small coloured relief-sculpted depiction of these almshouses with a group of four poor inmates (with a woman, perhaps a wife, behind), within a roundel survives on the right side of Richard Beaple's monument in St Peter's Church, to match one on the left side depicting a merchant pointing to a…

Founded in 1627, the almshouses have an ambitious symmetrical front with projecting centre and corners. The receding parts have one-storeyed colonnades of roughly hewn circular granite pillars, the front of which are in line with the projecting parts. The latter are gabled. The doorway is four-centred, the side parts with large four-light "posthumously Perpendicular" windows. There is a spacious courtyard behind with four ranges of almshouses arranged facing onto a large courtyard, with a passageway through from the street and another at the rear, leading to allotments. The chapel has a fine interior with a three-light east window and a shallow-coved plaster ceiling with the remains of…