Home > Somerset > Wraxall > The Battleaxes The Battleaxes

Picture source: Hania Franek

The Battleaxes was situated on Bristol Road. Originally a temperance hotel, the 1882 grade-II listed pub was known as the Widdicombe Arms in the 1970s and ‘80s. It closed at the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Planning consent was given to remodel the building into offices and homes. The developers have renamed it The Temperance.

Listed building details:

Village temperance inn, estate club house and caretaker's house, now a public house with integral restaurant and accommodation. Designed 1880-1881, dated 1882, by William Butterfield for Anthony Gibbs of Tyntesfield. Coursed rubble with freestone dressings and irregular quoins; mock timber framing to some of the first floor; plain tiled roofs; ashlar and rubble stacks. An irregular and asymmetrical group with the inn at the south-east and the former club hall and former caretaker's house to the north-west. The inn is 2 storeys with a central section of 2 coped gables with finials; the left gable has a chequer-board pattern; single light casement and cross windows on ground floor; 2- and 5-lights on first floor. The right window has a plain architrave and is surmounted by a flat gable with pinnacles; downpipe with a decorative Gothic style hopper and the letter G (Gibbs); off-centre gabled projecting porch with clasping buttresses, panelled doors in a hollow-chamfered, pointed surround under a hoodmould. To the left of the centre is a 2-bay section of irregular heights: at the right is a 2-light casement window with shouldered heads, and a timber-framed first floor; at the left is a projecting, single-storey, gabled wing with 2-light casement windows. To the right of the centre is a further irregular 2-bay section with a blocked door to the left and a C20 bow- fronted extension to the right; timber-framed first floor with a gabled dormer on corbels. The C20 extension joins the inn to the former club hall, through a porch with a hipped roof. The hall is of a single storey, 5 bays; timber-framed on a rubble base; single light casement windows; the centre projects as a 1:2:1 light canted stone bay, the windows have ashlar surrounds and shouldered heads, half pyramidal roof with a cast-iron finial. The north-west gable end is stone and has a 2-light Geometrical style window. Set back at the right is a single storey entrance wing; plank door in an ashlar surround with a cusped head and flanking buttress. Behind this - facing onto the Grove - is the former caretaker's house: 2 storeys, a flat roof concealed behind a moulded cornice, moulded string course; 2 bays, 2- and 3-light casement windows with, chamfered mullions and under relieving arches on the ground floor; central plank door in a segmental headed surround and under a triangular dripmould. The rear elevations are also quite irregular and asymmetrical with bows, bays and turrets on 3 floors. The interior of the inn is altered butthe former hall has a timbered roof (P. Thompson, William Butterfield, 1971).

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