Post by Dave on Oct 15, 2015 10:04:37 GMT
Sherborne Castle, The Abbey & Town 14th Oct 2015
One of the places on my to do list was Sherborne Castle, while this house is not really a castle; it has a fascinating history and full of wonderful gems from the past. What is in the house belongs to the house, unlike many National Trust properties where most of the contents were sold off to raise money for the people who owned them at the time.
It only took one and three quarter hours to drive from Paignton to the entrance of the castle and being a weekday and close to the end of the season for the castle, (it closes at the end of the month for the winter) there was not many other visitors.
You are not allowed to take any pictures inside the castle and you are required to turn of your mobile phone, but you are free to wonder around the house yourself and ask as many questions as you like to the people you find in most of the rooms. Their knowledge as you would expect is superb and you learn so much more about the castle and the people who lived there than you would ever find doing a web search.
From the outside of the house looking across the lake you can see the ruins of the old castle. This castle is now owned by English Heritage and you can after your visit to Sherburne Castle drive along the road and visit this site, but you do need to pay to get in.The cost for two adults to view Sherborne Castle and the grounds was £22 and when you do the lakeside walk, you end up right beside the old castle and get a great view of what is still there. Looking at it we decided there was not enough of the castle left to make us want and go on the site itself.
The lakeside walk is a joy and only has one part with a slight uphill slope on it( necessary to go up to see the old castle) if you walk along the wall at the top of the slope to its end, there is a fence that allows you to look and see the whole of the old castle. After spending some three hours at the castle and in its grounds, we headed off to Sherborne town centre. I found a car park but had to go back to the car to check its registration number as you have to feed it into the ticket machine. It’s to stop you handing the ticket to someone else when you leave, but at a cost of just £2.80 for a whole days parking, no one should mind having to pay. Take note Torbay.
Sherborne has a feel of stepping back in time, much of the old town, including the abbey and many of its medieval and Georgian buildings, is built from distinctive ochre-coloured ham stone. A few of the locals walking around also made us feel we were walking around Totnes.
The Abbey is a wonderful building inside and well worth visiting, there is no charge to go into it, but there is a box down the right hand side of the building that informs you it costs £2 per a minute to maintain the abbey you can put some money in, which we gladly did.
We only came across one empty shop in the town, but so many of the shops are the type that gets you wondering how they survive. Shops you will not find on most high streets and with price tags that make you wonder even more who would pay such prices. The only high street brand found apart from a few banks was Costa; they get everywhere but were rejected in Totnes.
Finding somewhere to eat proved slightly difficult. We looked at one menu displayed in a window and thought £9.50 for two pork sausages with a lump of mash was rather expensive. We found a nice pub in the end that did a great homemade steak and ale pie for me; Lyn had a monster burger with chips she said was lovely.
The drive home was fine until we got to the edge of Newton Abbot, will be so glad when our new road opens soon. A great day out in pleasant sunshine at a place I would highly recommend you visit.
History of Sherborne Castle
Sherborne has had a castle since the 12th Century. Roger Bishop of Salisbury built a castle to the east of the Town to administer the western part of his large diocese. In early Tudor times the Bishops built a small Hunting Lodge in the deer park attached to the Old Castle from which to observe the chase.
Sir Walter Raleigh acquired the Old Castle in 1592. At first he tried to modernise it, but then he built a new house in 1594 in the deer park. It was on the site of the Hunting Lodge which he incorporated into the foundations. His house was rectangular and four storeys high, with large square-headed windows filled with diamond pane glass. In 1600 he added hexagonal turrets to the four corners of his house, topped with heraldic beasts. The house was rendered from the outset, in the latest fashion.
In 1617 the diplomat Sir John Digby acquired Sherborne Castle and he added four wings to Raleigh’s building, giving the house its present H-shape. He copied the style adopted by Raleigh, of square-headed windows, and balustraded roofs with heraldic beasts, and added hexagonal turrets at the end of each wing, so the house looks of one piece.
In the Civil War the Digbys fought for the Royalist cause and the Old Castle was garrisoned and suffered two sieges. After the second siege in 1645 Col Fairfax and his Parliamentarian army systematically demolished the Old Castle. Thus the name ‘Sherborne Castle’ came to be applied to the new house in the park.
In the eighteenth century later generations of the Digby family modernised the Tudor house, adding Georgian sash windows, panelled doors and white marble fireplaces and filling the house with fine furniture.
In 1787 an extension was added to the west side of the house which provided more bedrooms and improved staff accommodation and kitchens.
The Victorian period saw only one major re-modelling, in the Solarium (Raleigh’s Parlour), reflecting the respect the Wingfield Digby owners held for the antiquity and historical associations of the house. In the First World War the Castle was used as a Red Cross Hospital and it was requisitioned by the Army in the Second World War.
