Mamhead House

The Mamhead estate is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as belonging to Ralph de Pomeroy. It was owned by the Carew and Ball families, of which latter Thomas Ball (1671–1749) was a merchant who planted many exotic trees. His head gardener Thomas Lucombe became a prominent nurseryman at Exeter. Subsequently, the estate was owned by the Earls of Lisburne until it was bought by Robert Newman in 1823. In the 1770s, Capability Brown had undertaken landscaping of the grounds. Newman was the senior partner in Newman & Co., a trading company based in Exeter that had established a small shipping fleet to support its trade with Portugal and Newfoundland. The original mansion house of the Balls…

Pevsner describes Mamhead as establishing "Salvin as the chief architect of his time for large country houses in the Tudor style". The house is large, of nine bays, with battlemented and gabled roofs. It follows a "conservative" plan, mainly dictated by Fowler's foundations which has been undertaken for his intended, classically planned building. All the main rooms face east, opening on to a long, axial, gallery. This gallery housed a collection of statues depicting English monarchs and worthies of the Tudor era, an unusual feature for the decoration of an English country house. Salvin's biographer, Jill Allibone, suggests the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe as the statues' most obvious…