Country Life Autumn / Winter 2016

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The grit that makes the pearl Shilstone House, Devon. The home of Sebastian and Lucy Fenwick A small farm in an intimate Devon valley has been brilliantly transformed into a new country house. John Goodall explains the story behind this remarkable project Photographs by Paul Highnam IT’S not easy to find Shilstone, but for the traveller who successfully navigates the deep lanes that lace the rolling countryside around Modbury in Devon, there is a remarkable treat in store. Nestled in the head of a narrow valley, the first impression is of a long-established country house with a broad main front flanked to either side by a walled garden and a cluster of farm buildings (Fig 1). As we shall discover, there is historical depth to this site, but the bulk of the house is of modern design and erected since 2000. In the early 1990s, Sebastian Fenwick was living at Puslinch, Devon, a fine Georgian country house. An enthusiast for architecture, however, he had a longstanding ambition to build a new house following in the footsteps of his grand- mother, Violet Fenwick, who, with Sir Edwin Lutyens, created Temple Dinsley (COUNTRY LIFE, April 22, 1911). Armed with a collection of Ordnance Survey maps, he spent many years doing what he cheerfully describes as ‘trespassing’ in search of a private Devon valley. In 1997, and by now married to Lucy, he finally purchased one of the sites he had identified, the valley and farm of what had become known as Shilston Barton. In the light of Mr Fenwick’s research into the landscape, and during the course of preparations for creating the new house, the site as a whole yielded a fascinating story. The Fenwicks recognised the potential for something perhaps even more intriguing than they had first anticipated: a newly commissioned house in a Classical idiom that could draw on the history of the site. The existing farmhouse might not be of outstanding architectural importance, but it could become the basis for its successor. It was—in short—grit that could make a pearl. Investigation demonstrated that the history of human occupation within the valley was very deep. An Iron Age enclosure of the 1st century BC was discovered in the area of the walled garden and, beneath the house itself, the remains of a late-14th-century building, presumably the seat of the manor documented here since Domesday. The construction of this manor house may be connected with the passage of the property in about 1390 to the Hill—or Hull—family, part of a dynasty of West <strong>Country</strong> lawyers. They subsequently adapted Fig 1 above: The new house and the farm buildings beyond. The original surviving fragment of the 1800 house is to the far right of the main façade. Its outline is faintly visible in the colour of the stone
Fig 2: Viewed from above, the house is set against an intimate and enclosed Devon landscape. Clearly visible here are the drawing room’s mullion and transom windows the building in the later Middle Ages. Perhaps the most remarkable finds related to the development of Shilstone by the Savery family from Totnes, who had purchased the property by 1614. The survey and clearance of the setting revealed the extensive remains of terraces and gardens around the house. These spread across the natural amphitheatre at the head of the valley and incorporated a series of pools, water courses, rills and cascades descending along its length from an arched grotto. This last is, in fact, an adapted water theatre, an Italianate garden feature formerly with a frieze of decorative figures executed in plaster. There is also a walled garden with a gazebo tower and raised walkway to the rear. The development of the gardens is not documented, but one figure presumably involved in their creation was Servington Savery, who lived ‘ A 1st-century BC Iron Age enclosure was discovered in the walled garden ’ at Shilstone all his life from the 1670s to the 1740s. A descendant described him in a family history of 1809 as a ‘man of a studious turn of mind, and of retired habits: amusing himself in philosophical pursuits’. His interests included researches into magnetism, which attracted the attention of the Royal Society. It is an intriguing possibility that an elder cousin of Servington might also have helped lay out the series of lakes down the length of the valley. Thomas Savery was born at Shilstone in about 1650, became a military engineer and then—through his interest in Devon mining and the problems of draining pits—invented a machine for raising water using steam pressure. He secured the post of surveyor to the waterworks at Hampton Court in 1714, the year before he died. An anonymous watercolour of about 1810 depicts the house as it must ➢
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Country Life Autumn / Winter 2016

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