- Parkland
A large and confusing house, now divided into four dwellings. Its neo-Tudor appearance is due to G.S.Repton’s modernisation of c. 1825-30 for S.T.Kekewich. In 1789 Rev John Swete wrote that it was ‘a spot of no common beauty’: he noted that ‘the chief beauty of Peamore lies in the undulating form of its grounds, rising and falling in the regular alteration of hills and dales - in its woods, groves and trees’. Polwhele wrote in 1793 that it was ‘one of the most pleasant seats in the neighbourhood of Exeter . . . the venerable forest trees, particularly beech, in many of the grounds and the park, so beautiful in itself from its little undulating hills and dales and so delightful from its command of prospect - such charms are doubtless sufficient to recommend Peamore to the observation of every traveller of taste’ and four years he noted that were ‘very fine’ beech trees at Peamore. White (1850) noted that it was‘a fine old mansion, encompassed by woody hills’ while Stockdale described it as ‘very delightfully situated altho’ the elevation of the mansion which was chiefly rebuilt in the Gothic style about 20 years since is rather low, yet with the surrounding plantations has a very interesting appearance’. A map in the Somerset Record Office shows the Parkland in the eighteenth century. There is a painting of Peamore dated 1804 by Francis Towne in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
PeamoreHouse listed Grade II.
Cherry & Pevsner: The Buildings of England – Devon, 1989: 626
T Gray: The Garden History of Devon, 1995: 176-7
