In 1718 a new house was built at Eggesford beside All Saints Church, replacing the earlier Chichester residence that had occupied the same ground. The Chichesters were established landowners in the parish, and their rebuilding reflected the architectural confidence of the early Georgian period. The new house was plain and symmetrical, constructed of local stone with brick dressings, sash windows and a hipped roof. It stood close to the churchyard wall, the tower visible from its upper rooms, a deliberate statement of continuity between estate and parish.
The house was not large, but it was well proportioned and typical of the Devon gentry’s taste for restrained classical design. Its setting was practical rather than picturesque: the Barton lay nearby, the church immediately adjacent, and the river valley opened below. The surrounding land was managed for production rather than display, with enclosed fields and modest plantations rather than landscaped parkland. The approach from the turnpike was direct, and the house served as the administrative centre of the estate rather than a showpiece.
The most reliable visual record of the building is the watercolour painted in 1797 by the Reverend John Swete, a Devon clergyman based at Oxton House near Kenton who travelled widely through the county documenting its houses and landscapes. His sketch, titled North East View of Eggesford, shows the 1718 house standing among trees above the Taw with the tower of All Saints Church just visible to the left of it. Swete’s work, now held in the Devon Record Office (ref. 564M/F11/99), provides a topographical record of Old Eggesford House before its demolition around 1830.
Ownership passed from the Chichesters to the Portsmouth family in the later eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century the house was considered outdated, and plans were made for a new mansion on higher ground, further from the church and commanding a wider view of the valley. The Georgian house was dismantled, its materials reused, and the site returned to quietness.
Old Eggesford House represents the transitional architecture of rural Devon between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries: functional, proportionate, and unpretentious. Its demolition closed a chapter in the estate’s history, but the record left by Swete and the surviving relationship between church and Barton preserve its place in the landscape.
