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East Budleigh

Just to the south of the village is Hayes Barton (private), a fine E-shaped Tudor house in which Sir Walter Raleigh was born in 1552. The Raleighs’ family pew can still be seen in All Saints’ Church, dated 1537 and carved with their (now sadly defaced) coat of arms. The church also contains a series of more than fifty 16th century bench-ends which were carved by local artisans into weird and imaginative depictions of their various trades.

A wall memorial in the church commemorates the Revd Ambrose Stapleton who was vicar here for 58 years from 1794 to 1852. He was a popular incumbent, partly it seems because he allowed local smugglers to use the vicarage to hide their brandy barrels.

A mile or so in the other direction is Bicton Park, best known for its landscaped gardens which were laid out in the 1730s by Henry Rolle to a plan by André Le Nôtre, the designer of Versailles. There is also a formal Italian garden, a remarkable palm house known as The Dome, a world-renowned collection of pine trees, and a lake complete with an extraordinary summer house, The Hermitage. Its outside walls are covered with thousands of tiny wooden shingles, each one individually pinned on so they look like the scales of an enormous fish. Inside, the floors are made from deer’s knucklebones. The Hermitage was built by Lady Louise Rolle in 1839 as an exotic summer-house; any occupation during the winter would have been highly inadvisable since the chimney was made of oak.