Day 10: Lewtrenchard Manor

Distance: 8.1 miles
Hoity-toity hotel count: 2
This post will be a day late ... It's all written and ready to go, but Lewtrenchard manor has no wifi! So, we'll post it tomorrow at the first wifi hot spot we pass.
Today we had an easy walk from the Endsleigh, a place where the English aristocracy came to fish and hunt, to Lewtrenchard manor, where they lived.








The heyday of the aristocracy ended 100 years ago, and today these places are hotels, which is great for us, because in the old days there is no way a couple of Canadian rubes like us could even get inside the wall.




The weather was blustery, much cooler than it has been, with alternating bands of sun and cloud. As we crested the hills, we had a few gusts that roared through the hedgerows and trees. One blew my hat off, sending me running back down the lane 200 feet. There was rain, some of it hard rain, but fortunately that all passed through last night and early this morning before we left. Our first taste of the Devon countryside was as beautiful as you could imagine, with black headed sheep, rolling hills, quiet lanes, and ever off in the distance the menacing dark mass of Dartmoor ("beware the moor!").




We walked through the front doors at Lewtrenchard before 1:00. The doors open into a small entrance, and then into a drawing room with a fireplace, dark inlayed wood panels, family crests in glass on the windows, and portraits on every available wall. The grate on the fireplace reads "1582". We made our way to reception and then wandered around. It's a big house. Sixteen bedrooms. A ballroom with a massive fireplace. The hallway outside our room has two pianos, a 10 person dining table, a lectern with a two hundred year old bible, divans, chairs, sofas, shelves of books, vases, and of course portraits:




Yeah, that's the hallway. Told you it was a big house.
No one really knows when the first house was built here, but it gets a mention in the Doomsday book of 1086 (a sort of census), so it goes back before that. Way back then, seems the place was a rental that went for four pounds a year. In 1327 the Trenchards took over, and gave the place a name. In 1556, they passed it on to the Monk family, who sold it off in 1623 to pay off debts after their patriarch, Sir Thomas Monk, ended up in the Exeter jail (Daryl, any relation?). That's when the Goulds, Henry and Ann, bought it, and their descendants still own it. They built a drawing room just after it became theirs, and their initials are still carved into the mantel:




I find all the portraits especially fascinating. They have some stuff about them at reception, so I took the time to get to know a few of the people.




Margaret Belfield married into the Gould family in 1740. She was described as a "good looking and spirited woman". I'd say she's an eighteenth century hottie. William and Margaret did very well, until William died in 1766 and their eldest son Edward gambled away the family fortune. Fortunately, Margaret had arranged that Lewtrenchard was mortgaged to her, and so she continued living there. Edward died in 1780, but Old Madam, as Margaret was known by then, worked hard, including doing manual labour in the fields, to recover the fortune of the estate. And she was still a hottie:




Lewtrenchard was to go to her daughter, confusingly also named Margaret, but Old Madam didn't think much of her husband (Charles Baring, like in the bank) so she arranged that the estate go to her grandson William, on the condition that he add Gould to his name. True to Old Madam's wishes, Margaret and Charles never owned Lewtrenchard, and William became the first Baring-Gould.
On April 10, 1796, all the shutters on the house are said to have blown open at once - Old Madam had died. It's said that her spirit haunts the grounds.
Two generations later came the Baring-Gould most responsible for the condition of the house today.




The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould inherited the place in 1872, and became parson and squire. He started a remodeling spree in 1876 that went on for 37 years. He financed all the work with his novels. It's hard to imagine how hard working this guy must have been. He wrote popular fiction (that's where the big money came from). He wrote and published sermons. He dabbled in archeology. He wrote travel guidebooks. He published anthologies of folk music. He wrote and published hymns. He's probably best known today for writing "Onward Christian Soldiers" (c'mon, sing a few bars, you know you want to!). At one point, Sabine Baring-Gould was the most published author in the British catalogue. A large portrait hangs in the ballroom. The receptionist told us that she can feel his eyes following her around.




He died in 1924 at the age of 90. His oldest son, Edward, inherited - but Edward and his wife had moved years ago to America and were living in Minneapolis. The returned to England to live out their lives at Lewtrenchard, and in London, but their heirs stayed in the USA. Today, the manor is owned by Sabine Baring-Gould's great granddaughter, Dr Marrial Almond.
And that just scratches the surface. There are dozens of portraits here, each with a story. The arctic explorer who ended up married to the daughter of his fiancée. The poisoned bride who (also) roams the halls as a ghost. The soldier granted a dukedom for helping restore Charles II to the those after the civil war. The lady with rhino horn dentures who died of jaw cancer. Just amazing.
And then for some reason there's one portrait that has nothing to do with Lewtrenchard. It's an 1870 painting called "Dutch peasant woman" and it hangs in our room.




Mom, could it be an Engel?
And now we get to stay here! Here's Dawn reading about the Queen over tea, scones, and clotted cream, sitting in front of the fireplace where Henry and Ann Gould carved their initials almost four hundred years ago.




Look on the table. Postcards! Maybe for you!
Tomorrow we walk on the north edge of Dartmoor to Okehampton. It's another fairly short day, so the plan is to linger over a slow full English breakfast here at this beautiful house.

Location:Lewtrenchard Manor