Attraction in Devon

Arlington Court near Barnstaple in north Devon is one of the most unusual and most rewarding National Trust properties in the southwest, a Regency house of modest exterior containing an extraordinary collection of objects assembled by Miss Rosalie Chichester across six decades of collecting until her death in 1949 and bequeathing the entire estate to the National Trust. The combination of the eclectic and personal character of the collection, which encompasses model ships, shells, pewter, costumes and an enormous array of objects with no common theme beyond Miss Chichester's enthusiastic acquisition, and the Victorian stables housing the national carriage collection creates a destination of remarkable individuality. The house reflects Miss Chichester's complete control of her environment across her long life, every room arranged according to her own taste and sense of order in a way that has been preserved by the National Trust as she left it. The experience of moving through rooms saturated with the accumulated objects of a single passionate collector is quite different from the polished presentation of great houses assembled for their architectural quality or art historical importance, and the personal character of Arlington Court is its greatest appeal. The Victorian stables of Arlington Court house the National Trust's carriage collection, over fifty vehicles from horse-drawn carriages and coaches to fire engines and estate vehicles, providing one of the most comprehensive collections of historic carriages on public display in Britain. The park and woodland walks provide excellent walking in the typical north Devon countryside.

Bicton Park Gardens in East Devon near the village of East Budleigh is one of the finest and most varied historic gardens in the southwest of England, a large garden estate of approximately 63 acres that combines formal gardens of the eighteenth century with Victorian additions, a significant collection of tender and unusual plants and a variety of visitor attractions that make it one of the most comprehensive garden destinations in Devon. The garden was originally laid out in the early eighteenth century in the French formal tradition and subsequently modified, extended and enriched by each successive generation of the Rolle and Clinton families who owned the estate. The Italian Garden, the formal section nearest the house, represents the best-preserved element of the eighteenth-century layout, with its geometric pattern of beds, clipped hedges, fountains and ornamental statuary creating a French-influenced composition of considerable formality and elegance. The American Garden, created in the Victorian period to house the then-fashionable collection of North American ornamental trees and shrubs introduced to British gardens during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contains mature specimens of exceptional size including one of the oldest surviving monkey puzzle trees in England. The Palm House at Bicton, a curved Regency glasshouse of great elegance, is one of the earliest surviving examples of the curved palm house design that preceded the great Victorian iron and glass conservatories and was the direct inspiration for Decimus Burton's Palm House at Kew Gardens. Its survival in original form at Bicton makes it one of the most historically significant garden buildings in Britain. The extensive woodland garden and pinetum contain a remarkable collection of conifer species, some of them of considerable rarity, and the overall diversity of the garden's plant collection reflects two centuries of enthusiastic and well-resourced plant collecting. A miniature railway, children's play areas and a garden centre add to the family visitor offer.

Burgh Island is a small tidal island just off the south Devon coast near Bigbury-on-Sea, accessible on foot across the sand at low tide and by a unique sea tractor at high water, whose combination of dramatic coastal setting, art deco hotel and strong associations with Agatha Christie make it one of the most distinctive and atmospheric destinations on the southwest coast. The island rises from the sand to a modest summit crowned by the remains of a medieval huer's hut, from which the tuna and pilchard shoals were once spotted and the fishermen summoned, and the old Pilchard Inn dating from the fourteenth century provides refreshments with considerable historic atmosphere. The Burgh Island Hotel, built in the art deco style in 1929, is the island's most significant building and one of the finest surviving examples of art deco hotel architecture in Britain. The hotel was developed by Archibald Nettlefold as a venue for the glamorous society set of the 1920s and 1930s, and the original guest list included Noël Coward, the Duke of Windsor and Agatha Christie, whose visits to the island inspired two of her Hercule Poirot novels. Evil Under the Sun and And Then There Were None were both written drawing on the island's distinctive character, and the hotel has capitalised on this association by maintaining an interior that recreates the art deco ambiance of the original building with considerable authenticity. The sea tractor that ferries hotel guests and visitors between the mainland beach and the island at high tide is a unique vehicle, a raised platform on stilts driven by a tractor mechanism that allows it to cross the submerged causeway when the sand is covered. The visual spectacle of the sea tractor making its crossing, the hotel visible on the island behind, provides one of the more surreal images available on the Devon coast. The views from the island summit across Bigbury Bay toward Plymouth Sound and the Bolt Tail headland are excellent, and the combination of the hotel's character, the island setting and the Agatha Christie associations makes Burgh Island an entirely memorable destination.

Cotehele in the Tamar Valley near Saltash is one of the most important and most atmospherically preserved medieval manor houses in England, a house built primarily in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that has survived largely without major alteration since the seventeenth century in a state of completeness unique among English medieval domestic buildings. The National Trust manages Cotehele, whose combination of the medieval great hall, the original furniture and textiles and the extraordinary series of tapestries that furnish the rooms creates one of the most genuine encounters with medieval domestic life available at any English country house. The house was built by Sir Richard Edgcumbe following his support for Henry Tudor's cause at Bosworth, and the subsequent prosperity of the family allowed substantial building and furnishing activity in the decades that followed. The crucial factor in Cotehele's survival is that the Edgcumbe family moved their principal residence to Mount Edgcumbe near Plymouth in the seventeenth century, leaving Cotehele as an occasional retreat that was never subjected to the modernisation that would have removed its medieval character. The tapestries and original furniture that furnish the rooms have never been moved. The Cotehele Quay on the Tamar below the house was once a busy commercial port and still houses a National Maritime Museum outstation with the restored Tamar barge Shamrock. The Tamar Valley gardens, the medieval dovecote and the mill complete an estate of exceptional variety and historical depth.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan near Mevagissey in Cornwall are one of the great garden restoration stories of the twentieth century, a Victorian garden of approximately 200 acres that fell into complete dereliction following the First World War when the estate staff were almost entirely lost to the fighting and which was restored from 1991 onward by Tim Smit, who subsequently went on to create the Eden Project. The gardens represent the most complete restoration of a Victorian productive and pleasure garden in Britain and the combination of the restored kitchen gardens, the Jungle garden, the Lost Valley and the Pleasure Grounds creates one of the most varied and most atmospheric garden experiences in the southwest. The productive gardens of Heligan, including the vast walled kitchen gardens with their restored vine houses, melon yard and pineapple pit, represent the ambitions of a Victorian estate that sought to produce every variety of fruit, vegetable and exotic plant from its own resources. The restoration of these spaces, worked by a team of gardeners using Victorian techniques and varieties, creates a living record of the Victorian kitchen garden tradition that has largely disappeared from working estates. The Jungle garden in the valley below the pleasure grounds, where tree ferns, gunnera, bamboo and exotic plants from the Southern Hemisphere grow in the shelter of the valley in conditions approaching the subtropical, provides the most dramatic visual contrast with the formal kitchen gardens above and represents the Victorian passion for exotic planting in its most complete surviving form.

Lanhydrock House near Bodmin in Cornwall is the finest and most completely realised Victorian country house in Cornwall, a house rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1881 in the high Victorian style that preserves in extraordinary completeness the full range of rooms necessary for the operation of a Victorian household from the great kitchen and its adjacent service rooms to the state apartments and the family bedrooms. The National Trust manages the house and the combination of the completeness of the service rooms and the quality of the state rooms provides one of the most comprehensive pictures of Victorian domestic life available at any National Trust property. The kitchen and service wing of Lanhydrock is the most completely preserved example of a Victorian country house service department in England, the larder, dairy, bakehouse, scullery and kitchen all equipped with the original Victorian fittings, equipment and utensils in a condition that allows the visitor to understand exactly how the immense Victorian household operated. The contrast between the elaborately decorated state rooms and the functional simplicity of the service areas demonstrates the social stratification of the Victorian household with unusual clarity. The grounds of Lanhydrock, with their formal parterres below the house, the nineteenth-century plantings of the parkland and the wooded valley of the Fowey providing the background walking, complete an estate of considerable variety and natural beauty. The combination of the house, the service rooms and the landscape creates one of the most complete and most informative Victorian country house visits available in the southwest.

Marwood Hill Garden near Barnstaple in north Devon is one of the finest privately owned gardens in southwest England, a garden of approximately 20 acres created in a valley from the 1950s onward in a programme of continuous planting that has produced a garden of exceptional botanical richness. The garden is particularly celebrated for its national collections of astilbe, iris and tulbaghia and for the outstanding waterside planting of the valley floor. The three lakes in the valley floor provide the waterside conditions supporting extensive plantings of iris, primula, gunnera and the astilbe collection that represents one of the finest in Britain. The reflections of the surrounding trees and plantings in the still water of the lakes provide the most visually satisfying garden moments, particularly in the golden evening light falling into this west-facing valley. The garden's remoteness from the main tourist routes of north Devon has preserved it from overcrowding, and the combination of the botanical quality, the landscape setting and the personal character of a garden still maintained with its creator's standards creates a visit of considerable distinction for those interested in serious horticulture.

Morwellham Quay on the Tamar River in Devon is the most completely preserved and most comprehensively interpreted nineteenth-century copper mining port in Britain. The combination of the restored quayside buildings, the tramway tunnels, the working mine accessible by tram and the open-air museum of Victorian working life creates one of the most immersive industrial heritage experiences in the southwest. At the height of the Victorian copper boom in the 1840s and 1850s, Morwellham was the busiest copper port in the world. The ore extracted from the great Tamar Valley mines was loaded onto sailing vessels here for export to the Swansea smelters and the world copper market. The subsequent rapid decline left the quay derelict and preserved in its Victorian condition beneath woodland growth, cleared by the restoration project of the 1970s to reveal the extraordinary industrial heritage beneath. The volunteer costumed interpreters working in the blacksmith's forge, the assay office and the various industrial buildings in period costume provide one of the most engaging forms of heritage interpretation available at any industrial museum in England.

Restormel Castle near Lostwithiel in Cornwall is one of the finest and best-preserved examples of a circular shell keep castle in England, a round tower of thirteenth-century masonry on a high mound above the River Fowey whose completeness and elegant simplicity make it one of the most satisfying medieval castle experiences in the southwest. English Heritage manages the castle and the combination of the architectural quality, the views over the Fowey valley and the historical associations with the Black Prince give it a significance beyond its modest scale. The castle was built in its current form in the late thirteenth century when the earldom of Cornwall passed to Edmund, brother of Edward I, and the circular shell keep replacing the earlier earthwork represents the most ambitious castle building in medieval Cornwall. The keep's walls stand to their full height for most of the circuit, the internal faces retaining the remains of the domestic buildings that lined the interior walls and provided the hall, solar, kitchen and chapel of a fully functioning castle residence. Edward the Black Prince, the son of Edward III who was Duke of Cornwall from 1337, used Restormel as his headquarters in Cornwall, and the castle is associated with the organisation and departure of the Black Prince's campaigns in France, including the victory at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. The earldom and subsequent duchy of Cornwall, which Restormel administered, provided the resources that funded Edward's military campaigns and established the model for the independent duchy that continues to the present day. The walk to the castle from Lostwithiel through the water meadows of the Fowey valley and the views from the castle walls over the river valley provide an excellent and rewarding pastoral setting for a heritage visit.

RHS Rosemoor Garden near Great Torrington in north Devon is one of the four regional gardens maintained by the Royal Horticultural Society, a 65-acre garden in the Torridge Valley that has developed from a personal garden donated to the RHS in 1988 by Lady Anne Berry into a comprehensive display garden of considerable quality and variety. The combination of the original intimate garden created by Lady Berry with the larger formal gardens, arboretum and naturalistic plantings added since the RHS took over management creates a garden that rewards exploration and provides interest in every season. The original Lady Anne's Garden, which surrounded the cottage that Lady Berry occupied on the estate, retains the personal character of a private garden created with taste and knowledge over many years. The collection of old roses, shrubs and woodland plants established by Lady Berry provides the core of a planting character that the RHS has respected and maintained while expanding the garden around it. The formal garden area added by the RHS provides a sequence of themed gardens in a more architectural setting, including the Rose Garden with its large collection of modern and heritage roses, the Fruit and Vegetable Garden demonstrating productive gardening techniques and the Cottage Garden planted with traditional perennials and biennials. The Stream Garden, developed in the more naturalistic character appropriate to the valley bottom, provides a contrasting approach to planting that follows the natural contours and hydrology of the landscape. The north Devon countryside surrounding Rosemoor, including the Torridge Valley and the coast at Westward Ho and Clovelly a short drive to the northwest, provides excellent complementary natural and heritage interest for a garden visit.