Bowhill

Bowhill is a house built around 1500 for Roger Holland, a prominent Exeter citizen, Member of Parliament, and Sheriff of Devon. It later passed to the Careys of Anthony in Cornwall through Holland's daughter, and was subsequently owned by John Carew, MP for Tregony and a Regicide, whose execution in 1660 briefly caused the property to revert to the Crown. The building has been in the care of the Department of the Environment and then English Heritage since 1976.

The house is notable for its intensive use of cob construction, except for the Hall, Parlour, and Great Chamber, which are built of local volcanic trap. There is some use of Heavitree stone in the Hall stack, north-east stair, and kitchen west doors. External walls are plastered and the roof is covered in Delabole slate laid in traditional random-width courses, pegged over rent laths, bedded and torched. The structural timber-framed first-floor partition dividing the Hall range from the Great Chamber is double-lathed over studs and infilled with hay-cob, much of which has been restored.

The plan is essentially a reduced courtyard arrangement, formerly of four ranges with a gabled projection to the south-east. The domestic range faces south overlooking the Moretonhampstead road, with the Hall at right angles forming the east range, its upper end to the north. The kitchen occupies the remains of the west range and is reached by a restored pentice extending from the through passage to the south end of the Hall.

The ground floor of the south range contains a well-lit Parlour off the through passage; a room formerly subdivided into pantry and buttery with individual access from the Parlour and from the pentice; a store room; and a large room to the south-west with a restored through passage providing direct access from the road to the courtyard. The upper floor of the south range has the Great Chamber above the Parlour, formerly reached by a lost stair turret on the south-east corner of the lost south-east block; a large unheated Inner Chamber; and a fine lodging chamber formerly with an oriel window, accessed by a gallery and stairs on the west range. The courtyard was formerly galleried to the west and probably to the north, giving access to lodgings on the west, east, and north sides and to the principal lodging to the south-west.

The Hall evidently fell into disuse early. In the 17th century the ground floor of the south range was altered: the parlour was extended by one bay to include a pair of large windows on the south side, the screen between pantry and store was removed, and the Inner Chamber was subdivided. These alterations were partially reversed in the 1970s as part of a scheme to reinstate medieval volumes. Major downgrading alterations occurred around 1800, concentrating living quarters in the south range with a new kitchen built in the north-east corner of the courtyard. At this time or earlier, the galleries, pentices, Hall porch, south-east block, north range, and oriel were removed, and the east and west ranges were truncated. The cob north, east, and west gables were removed and the latter two closed in by simple framing. Glazing bar sashes were inserted piecemeal in ground and first-floor openings and in the east gable. The whole was re-roofed, possibly excepting the Hall. A small two-storey extension was added to the north-west in the mid-19th century with plain cross sash windows, with another installed in the west gable. A cob cross-wall in the centre of the south range survived into the 1960s when several seriously damaging changes were made.

The exterior displays two storeys. The east elevation has an 8/8-pane sash set in a gable, above large rectangular window openings with hood mould and central king mullion. The part to the right retains two arched stone heads with sunken spandrels; the part to the left is wholly replaced by a 6/6-pane sash. There is a pointed arched parlour door to the right, then a larger moulded pointed arch to the screens passage doorway, formerly with a porch. The principal ornament is reserved for the Great Hall, which has two 2-light, square-headed cinquefoil and transomed windows with head stops on the east side, flanking a large lateral stack with upper part rebuilt since 1976. Other elevations have inserted sashes. The south elevation has, between the restored kitchen doorway and the east corner, a label mould over original window openings, some with cinquefoil-headed lights, and a lateral stack to the parlour with rebuilt brick flue. The north elevation has an early 19th-century block projecting to the north-west with sashes and a 17th-century restored 5-light chamfered wood-mullioned window above a moulded round-arched doorway. The courtyard elevations are particularly notable for windows to the north side of the Great Hall, identical in form to those on the south side; a cinquefoil-headed light to the north side of the east elevation; and a pentice fashioned after the original, which connects the kitchen block to the north to the screens passage to the south.

The principal surviving features of Bowhill are the remarkable roof structures in the Great Hall and Great Chamber, which derive from the jointed cruck system covering the rest of the house. They relate to a small but important group of local buildings including the Exeter Guildhall, the Deanery, the Law Library, and the later roof at Cadhay near Ottery St Mary. Their distinctive features include heavy moulded plates at collar level, coves above the collar, and intermediate trusses (actually braces tenoned to common rafters which clasp the collar plates); carved bosses; wind braces terminating as ashlars; and lost hammer-beam sculptures. Two simple Perpendicular capitals enrich the end truss of the Great Chamber. The Hall is roofed in six bays; the south range in eleven bays, four of them over the Great Chamber. The west kitchen range is of two bays. The Oriel Chamber has a simple wind-brace roof and was designed to have bosses.

The Hall fireplace is a reconstruction. Similar fireplaces, lacking shelves, survive in the Parlour and Great Chamber. The kitchen fireplace has a broad segmental arch sheltering a bread oven and, formerly, ovens opening from the north. All fireplaces have characteristic joggled arches and are built of fine local trap. The kitchen fireplace appears to have a framework of high shelves above it, possibly a form of smoke dispersal before it was floored. The Hall retains fine two-centred moulded trap doorways; there was another to the south range. Many original timber mouldings survive, distinguished by forward-facing chamfers to openings.

The mansion has been repaired to reinstate the major volumes of the medieval plan, except for the kitchen where a reused floor was inserted around 1800. The kitchen chamber is now accessed from the Oriel Chamber via a 1970s breakthrough. The roofs relate to a small but influential group of roofs in Exeter, notably the Guildhall and the Deanery, and have affinities with the more sophisticated roofs at the Convent of the Presentation of Mary, the Law Library, and at Cadhay. Bowhill was depicted in the foreground of the Buck Brothers' "The South-West Prospect of Exeter" in 1736. It was the centre of well-known nursery gardens where the famous Luccombe (Devon) oak was developed. The building declined and after World War II was engulfed in suburban development. It was finally purchased by the Department of the Environment in 1976, by which time its condition was seriously unstable.