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 treasure chest with three sailing ships on the sea behind.

[3] During the English Civil War Barnstaple changed hands four times, and signs of the skirmishes can still be seen at Penrose's Almshouses, where bullet holes can be found in the door to the far left of the entrance gate.

Probably dating to the late 17th or early 18th-century, it consists of a simple wooden casing shaped like a box, with a lead roof and an iron spout and handle.

[1][7] The chapel has a fine interior with a three-light east window and a shallow-coved plaster ceiling with the remains of 17th-century decorated plasterwork with a vine motif and a central pendant for a chandelier.