Qualla: Luscombe Castle

Luscombe Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Northmetpit at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. John Nash was forty-five years old, working through a string of country houses, and not yet famous when Charles Hoare of the Hoare banking family handed him a commission unlike any he had taken before. Build me a castle, said Hoare, but make it asymmetrical, picturesque, comfortable on the inside, dramatic from the approach, and place it just so in a Devon valley above the sea. For the gardens Hoare hired Humphry Repton, who had already been thinking about how Nash's buildings might sit in landscape. The two men collaborated. Hoare began acquiring the Luscombe land in 1797 and had the older house cleared; construction of the new castle began in 1800, and what rose between the wooded hills above Dawlish was something that had never been built quite like this before in England: a Picturesque Gothic country house, with castellated parapets, turrets, pinnacles, and a three-storey octagonal tower, designed not to defend anyone but to look like it might once have done. It was Nash's first castle for a client. He would build many more. He would never build the first one again.

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Image: Northmetpit at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Luscombe Castle: A Banker's Quiet Project

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Charles Hoare started buying up the Luscombe land in 1788. His sister Henrietta was the widow of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 9th Baronet of Killerton, near Exeter, which gave the Hoare family a personal connection to Devon. By 1799 Charles had cleared the existing house and Nash and ...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Luscombe Castle: Inside the Octagon

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MichaelMaggs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Through the porte-cochere a visitor enters a circular hall. To the right, the staircase hall. To the left, the dining room, with windows at the far end that open onto the park. Straight ahead is the drawing room, which occupies the ground floor of the octagonal tower, with bookca...

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Image: MichaelMaggs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Luscombe Castle: The American Garden and Repton's Last Word

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Lew747, CC BY-SA 3.0. Repton laid out the grounds and John Veitch, founder of the Veitch nursery dynasty at Killerton, actually planted them. The estate extends to 140 hectares, of which 10 hectares are gardens, both formal and informal, with the remainder in parkland and woodland. The main pleasure g...

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Image: en:User:Lew747 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Luscombe Castle: Evacuees and the Quiet Long Afterwards

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. During the Second World War, Luscombe Castle was used as an evacuation point. A boys' preparatory school was housed in the building, whose pupils included a young William Franklyn, later the British actor known for the Schweppes advertisements. Girls in the care of Barnardo's als...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0