Wembury House

Wembury House is a country house set in a landscaped garden, built in 1803 on the site of a late 16th-century house. The structure is made of stone rubble that was formerly rendered, with ashlar dressings and an ashlar basement. It features a parapet with plain stone coping and string courses, as well as rusticated stone quoins. The roof is slate and hipped. The house has two storeys, an attic, and a basement, with five bays. It boasts large sash windows with glazing bars, framed in moulded stone architraves. The central doorway includes a large rectangular fanlight above fielded panel double doors, and is flanked by a porch supported by slender Tuscan columns, topped with an entablature and a cast iron balcony. In front, there is a deep basement area enclosed by plain iron railings, and one bay is set back to the left (north). The east garden front also has five bays and features niches on either side of the central ground floor window.

Inside, the relatively plain interior remains virtually unaltered, retaining its original joinery, plasterwork, chimneypieces, and staircase. The house was constructed for Thomas Lockyer between 1803 and 1806, replacing a late 17th-century or early 18th-century house that had been built on the site of a large mansion owned by Sir John Hele, who purchased the estate in 1592. The original mansion was reputedly enormous, but only the wall to the west survives today. A drawing by Edmund Prideaux, dated 1716, depicts Wembury House as a late 17th-century/early 18th-century structure and shows it as the seat of John Pollexfen. This drawing is currently held at Prideaux Place in Cornwall.