Montacute House sits on the western edge of the village, an Elizabethan statement in Ham stone built between 1598 and 1601 for Sir Edward Phelips, lawyer, Speaker of the House of Commons and later Master of the Rolls. The house is H-shaped, three storeys with attic, its façades packed with mullioned and transomed windows and finished with obelisk finials and Dutch gables. The original entrance was on the east front, reached through a formal court and gatehouse; that arrangement survived into the seventeenth century before later owners began to turn the house round.
Today the visitor approach is from the west, through the nineteenth-century drive and clipped yew avenue laid out for William and Ellen Phelips with the advice of their gardener, Mr Pridham. The west front itself is an eighteenth-century graft, built by Edward Phelips V using major fragments from Clifton Maybank in Dorset. It reads as a confident re-facing rather than a polite porch: the house is still fundamentally late sixteenth century, but the west side tells you that the family reasserted themselves after a long period of neglect.
Behind the west front the plan is still that of a late Tudor great house. The east front looks out over the East Court, a walled, rectangular enclosure that began life as the formal entrance court. High Ham stone walls with balustrades, obelisk finials, corner pavilions and central gazebos survive almost intact from the late sixteenth century. The gatehouse that once stood in the middle of the east wall has gone, removed by Edward Phelips V when he shifted the entrance to the west in the 1780s. The interior of the court has been simplified repeatedly: Victorian clipped yews and gravel panels, Vita Sackville-West’s planting schemes in the 1940s, and then Phyllis Reiss’s reworking in the 1950s. The underlying geometry, however, is still the original one.
North of the house is the formal North Garden, occupying the site of a seventeenth-century compartment recorded in a 1667 survey. Mr Pridham imposed a mid-nineteenth-century parterre here for William and Ellen Phelips: cruciform gravel walks, a central quatrefoil fountain pool with stone balustrade and finials, and raised perimeter walks contained by yew hedges. The elaborate bedding has gone, but the structure remains clear enough. The orangery closes the terrace to the west, another mid-nineteenth-century addition that sits comfortably within the older framework.
South of the house, the Yew or Fig Walk and the Cedar Lawn occupy ground that was once Pig’s Wheatie Orchard and later a bowling green. A stone wall on one side carries fan-trained figs; a high yew hedge on the other defines the walk. The Cedar Lawn still carries a pair of mature cedars at its southern end, and an arcaded summerhouse built from recycled sixteenth- or seventeenth-century fragments stands in the corner. Beyond this, the Column Garden and lawns lead the eye out towards the park rather than back to the house.
The park to the east grew out of the priory’s medieval deer park, enclosed on St Michael’s Hill by the Cluniac community in the twelfth century. When Edward Phelips built the house he began to formalise the land immediately around it; over the next two centuries the family extended the park piecemeal as they acquired or exchanged land. By 1630 there was already a “Parke” as well as courts and gardens. The eastern half of the present park was still in cultivation in 1838; only in the mid nineteenth century did it reach its current extent. Lime, ash and oak avenues mark former roads and drives, including the stopped-up public road that once ran across the park to the south-east of the house.
To the south, Park Covert and the Ladies’ Walk occupy the upper slopes of the former deer park. The Ladies’ Walk is a shrubbery path of late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century date, cut along the top of the slope with deliberate views back over house, park and village. Below it, Lower Park remains pasture with scattered trees. To the west, St Michael’s Hill rises as an isolated cone, crowned since 1760 by Edward Phelips V’s folly tower on the site of the Norman motte and bailey and the medieval chapel of St Michael. Donne’s late eighteenth-century plan shows a winding walk and a summerhouse on the hill; the basic idea of a planted, ornamental eminence survives even if the details have shifted.
The service side of the estate sits to the south: the walled kitchen gardens, now grassed and used for parking, follow the eighteenth-century pattern of two compartments enclosed by high Ham stone walls. The mid-nineteenth-century stable block, in late sixteenth-century style, occupies the site of earlier stables and probably stands close to Thomas Phelips’s original house. Lodges on the west and south-east approaches mark the nineteenth-century reorganisation of access, when the east entrance was finally abandoned in favour of the west drive and the New Lodge route from Odcombe.
Montacute’s later history is one of decline, rescue and controlled adaptation. After the Civil War the family’s finances faltered; by the mid eighteenth century the house had been neglected for nearly a century. Edward Phelips V reasserted control, altered the house and approaches, and built the tower on St Michael’s Hill. The nineteenth century brought William and Ellen Phelips, Mr Pridham’s formal gardens, and the intrusion of the railway line, now the A3088, along the northern edge. Lord Curzon’s tenancy in the early twentieth century brought essential repairs but no wholesale remodelling. In 1931 E. E. Cook bought the estate and passed it to the National Trust. The result is a house and landscape where late sixteenth-century structure, eighteenth-century reorientation and nineteenth-century formalism all remain legible, without the smoothing and reinvention that have obscured so many other places.
