Gatcombe House

Gatcombe House, now divided into four tenements, is a country house dating back to around the 16th century, with significant alterations made in the 17th, 18th, and early and mid-19th centuries. The house is constructed of stone rubble, mostly plastered, and has slate roofs. It is built around a small courtyard.

The south elevation features a gable to the right, with a double sash window on the ground floor and a sash above, both with moulded wooden labels. A similar label is present above the sash in the wing projection to the right (south-east). A wide, gabled projection, externally appearing early 19th century, dominates the centre of the south range and contains the music room, which itself dates to the 18th century. This section has three bays with tall sash windows. To the left of the projection is an early 19th-century conservatory with pilasters and large sash windows. The west front was added around 1830. It is stuccoed with a slate hipped roof featuring bracketed, oversailing eaves. The symmetrical two-storey front has a 2:3:2 bay arrangement with sash windows complete with glazing bars. The central section is advanced, featuring a pediment and two orders of pilasters, Doric below Ionic above. There are niches on either side of the centre first-floor window, and a porte cochere supported by four columns with a Doric entablature. The north and east elevations are asymmetrical and display later additions. An old nail-studded plank door is located on the east side of the south-east range.

Internally, No. 2’s former music room has a fine 18th-century plaster ceiling, with an oval centrepiece depicting Mars riding an eagle within a sunburst, alongside musical instruments and implements of war in the corners. A moulded modillion cornice also adorns the room. No. 3 contains a room with a 17th-century moulded plaster ceiling subdivided into three compartments with moulded oval panels. In the upper part of the former hall, a first-floor plaster vaulted ceiling displays 17th-century geometric moulded plasterwork; the arched principals of the hall roof have been plastered over. No. 4, at the east end of the hall, has a moulded granite fireplace in a first-floor room, three moulded plaster shields in a first-floor passage, and a fine early 18th-century staircase with three turned balusters per tread and a moulded handrail ramped up to fluted column newels. Nos. 1 and 2 contain moulded plasterwork and a niche in the hall featuring a fantail dove in the arched head.

Gatcombe House was a manor recorded in the Domesday Book. Richard Fortescue sold it to William Bogan (Mayor of Totnes) in 1542, whose son married Prothesy Bodley, sister of Sir Thomas Bodley of the Bodleian Library. The west front was added around 1830 by the Cornish family. A reset tablet inscribed "W.B. 1687" is set into the garden wall adjoining the south-east side.

The house is the birthplace of Zachary Bogan (1625-1659), who published treatises on Homer and Hesiod.