Map:
This profile of Forest Wesleyan Chapel has been compiled by Jo Lewis and Tony Mansell.
Kresen Kernow documents: https://kresenkernow.org/SOAP/search/RelatedNameCode.keyword/CRO%7CUK%7C633/
1829 Forest Wesleyan Chapel
The first Forest Wesleyan Chapel was built where the Sunday School now stands. It was constructed of cob and thatch. The land was leased from the Basset family.
There are Insurance papers (1871-1874) for Forest Gate Wesleyan Chapel.
1882: Demolished and the site used for a Sunday school.
1881 Forest Wesleyan Sunday School
1881: Tenders invited for the erection of a new Wesleyan chapel. Architect: James Hicks. (Cornubian and Redruth Times – Friday 23 September 1881)
Build date: 1882.
Built on the site of the 1829 chapel.
Heritage Gateway: Wesleyan Sunday school. 1881 (date panel), the same date as the new chapel nearby (138349), rebuilt on site of 1829 Wesleyan chapel. Simple vernacular building with extension at rear. 4-pane sashes, gabled entrance porch at front end. On the modern Mastermap (2006) it is annotated ‘Hall’ suggesting that it is used as a community hall
https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MCO32558&resourceID=1020
1882: New chapel. (Royal Cornwall Gazette – Friday 23 June 1882)
1881 Wesleyan Methodist Chapel
Heritage Gateway: Wesleyan wayside chapel built to supersede the original 1829 chapel on the same site. Built of rubble with granite dressings. Formerly in Illogan parish. Gothic style. 3-bay front gable end with 2-tier buttresses dividing the bays, the central bay with a 3-light traceried window, the side bays with trefoil-headed lights. 3-bay right-hand return is the entrance front with central buttressed porch and flanking 3-light traceried windows. Unaltered interior with original fittings. Part of group with 1881 dated Sunday school nearby (b1). In 2006 the chapel was sold and converted to domestic use. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MCO32559&resourceID=1020
1881: Built as a Wesleyan chapel to replace the 1829 chapel.
Built at a cost of £1,100, with a lease from the Basset family.
1932: The Wesleyan, Primitive Methodist and the United Methodist Church amalgamated to become the Methodist Church of Great Britain.
1932: Became Forest Methodist Church.
1940: Seating for 250 (Revd David Easton)
1951: Re-dedication and re-opening of organ. (West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser – Thursday 28 June 1951)
(Photo: David Philp)
Re-opening of Forest Methodist Chapel in 1973 (Photo: Roy Blewett)
Hazel Roach nee Brown circa 1995 at Forest organ (Photo: Hazel /Roy Blewett)
2003: Closed. (Revd David Easton)
2006: Sold and now residential.
David Thomas entry in Facebook in 2021
“The former Wesleyan Chapel at Forest stands in an isolated and windswept spot on the north side of the road leading out of the village of Four Lanes and Pencoys towards Helston. There is hardly a house nearby and it is testimony to their faith, perseverance and witness that the Wesleyans built a chapel in such a remote spot.
The building shown in the photograph, a postcard image by the Illogan Churchtown photographer E A Bragg, dating from about 1904-1907, is in fact the second Wesleyan chapel at Forest, built in the Gothic style in 1881 at a cost of £1100 and was leasehold property on the Basset of Tehidy estate. There was an earlier chapel, constructed of cob and thatch, dating from the earlier nineteenth century, which originally stood on the site of the Sunday School, a little closer by a few yards to Four Lanes. Insurance papers in the Kresen Kernow Archives at Redruth refer to this earlier building as the Wesleyan Church at Forest Gate. It too was leased from the Basset estate.
Bragg’s sharp photograph is a posed scene, capturing the ubiquitous local children, one with a bicycle, who usually populate his images, while a man riding past on a horse, has stopped to get his face recorded for posterity, roughly 115 years ago. There is a small entrance porch on the east side of the building.
Once the new chapel had been built in 1881 the old cob built Wesleyan chapel was demolished and a new Sunday School built on that site, with its date over the doorway of 1882…
The chapel archives at Redruth include an abstainers’ roll book for the period 1930-1934 so the Temperance Movement was obviously active at Forest. Members would have had to sign the Pledge ‘I promise to abstain from all intoxicating liquors’. We live in a very different world today. The world of the early twentieth century is unimaginable to today’s young people.
Methodist worship and witness at Forest ceased around 2003, probably after nearly two centuries and the surviving congregation was amalgamated with the ex-UMFC chapel in the village of Four Lanes to form the Four Lanes United Methodist Church. The 1881 chapel shown in the photo is now a private dwelling.
A little look then at an isolated roadside Wesleyan chapel in West Cornwall, truly a wayside Bethel. ‘What mean ye by these stones?’”