The school on Pen Y Bryn prior to the posting date of 1909

The former school in around 1977, minus many original features

I was puzzled when I saw this building in other photographs of the village, because it looked to me like a Nonconformist chapel, but I had no recollection of seeing it.  Local residents Dai and Helen Williams told me that it was once a school and has now been converted to apartments.  I vaguely recalled that in my general reading about chapels, there had been a small chapel on the side of Pen Y Bryn, the small hill with the folly on top, and that this was converted to or replaced by a school.

Aberdovey in the late 1880s/early 1890s, from the book Round The Coast

Sure enough, Hugh M. Lewis (who attended the school) says that the school replaced a small Congregational Chapel called Capel Bach (Low Chapel) that had been built on the site in 1845. In the photograph to the right it is shown overlooking the sea at the very far right of the scene.  The photograph, from the book Round the Coast, is described on an earlier post.  The chapel was abandoned when the Congregationalists built a bigger chapel on the seafront, on Glandyfi Terrace, opposite today’s Information Centre, where it still stands (you can read about the Congregationalist buildings in Aberdovey on an earlier post).

Lewis says that the old chapel was knocked down in order to erect a purpose-built school that cost £600.00 and opened in January 1894 with 102 pupils.  The building is rendered today, but was presumably built of local stone, and has brick features around the windows.  The bell at the front of the school was used to call children to attend, in the same way that church bells call congregations to worship.  Playgrounds were segregated, one for girls and one for boys.  This was not the first school in the village, and I’ll talk about education, which was influenced by religious interests, on a future post.  I love the washing hanging on the line in the foreground – not a usual feature of picture postcards these day, unless you happen to be in Venice.

Other buildings of note are also shown in the photograph, all covered on earlier posts.  At the far left is the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, and in the middle of the photograph, now Dovey Marine, the roof of Calvinistic Methodist Chapel in the middle of Chapel Square is just visible.  In the background, the tower of St Peter’s Church is clearly visible, and just beyond and set above it, the Calvinist Tabernacl dominates.

I realized that it had to be somewhere near the footpath from Chapel Square up to Pen-Y-Bryn, and when I walked up there, it turns out that one side sits along the footpath.  The photographs above were taken from the footpath and from Pen-Y-Bryn.

The card is by Sir Evelyn Wrench’s early postcard company (about whom more on an earlier post).  Wrench had been out of business for five years when this postcard was posted in 1909 from Aberdovey to an address in the village of Bawdeswell near East Dereham, Norfolk.  This says a lot about the dangers of using postmarks to date photographs on postcards!

Main Source:

Hugh M. Lewis.  Aberdyfi Portrait of a Village.