- Parkland
The Elizabethan gatehouse, with its nineteenth century romantic mock fortfications provides a show entrance to the north.
Shute Barton has a medieval core which was greatly expanded in the 1650’s. Leland noted in the early sixteenth century that it was ‘a right goodly manor house . . . and by it a goodly great park’. A good part of it was torn down in the 1780’s in order to create a drive from the gate-house to the newly built Shute House. The surviving parts consist of a U shape of three rubble stone ranges evocatively preserved in the sensitive SPAB restoration of 1955. In the mid seventeenth century there existed extensive fruit orchards with many varieties of apple, apricot, peach, nectarine, pear, cherry, plum and fig trees.
Shute House, a handsome late Palladian composition of 1787 for Sir John Pole. Veitch advised on the planting of the grounds and the construction of the new drive. Much of the landscape works were carried out by William Ridwood Hoskins of nearby Kilmington. Some 10,000 trees were planted, several new roads, a lawn and a ha-ha were created. Stockdale noted that ’Some years since the Royal Society of Arts presented the late Sir William Templer Pole with a Gold Medal for his extensive plantations on this estate and which it is a pleasure to remark that he lived to witness arriving to perfection, indeed, but very few estates in the county present a greater diversity of cultivated landscape, there is also a small park of 150 acres, well stocked with deer’. Extensive parkland and the ha-ha survive.
Shute Barton is listed Grade I, Gatehouse at Shute Barton is listedGrade I, Stables converted into houses, Barn north west of Shute Barton, pair of gatepiers and gates 600m west of Shute Barton and stables 60m north west of Shute Barton all listedGrade II, Shute House is listedGrade II*
Cherry & Pevsner: The Buildings of England – Devon, 1989: 729
S Pugsley: Devon Gardens – An Historical Survey, 1994: 34, 36
T Gray: The Garden History of Devon, 1995: 203-207, 205
R.Polwhele: History of Devonshire v.2, 1793: 315
Historical MSS Commission Architectural history v. 2, 1970: item 2108
