Blackborough House

Blackborough House in 2006
location within Devon
General information
Status	renovation planned
Type	Country house
Architectural style	Italianate
Town or city	Blackborough, Devon
Country	England
Coordinates	50°52′46.1″N 3°17′42.4″W / 50.879472°N 3.295111°W / 50.879472; -3.295111
Groundbreaking	1838
Completed	1840
Grounds	10 acres
Design and construction
Architect	James Thomas Knowles
Other information
Number of rooms	60

Blackborough House is a grade II listed country house in Blackborough, Devon, 3 miles east of Cullompton. It was built in 1838 and is currently in a semi-derelict state but there are now plans to restore it and turn it into an events centre.

It was built in 1838 by James T. Knowles for George Wyndham, 4th Earl of Egremont, of Orchard Wyndham, Somerset. Originally designed as an Italianate palace, there were no funds to complete it on such a scale, so it was constructed as two smaller, linked buildings for the Earl and his cousin, the local rector. His other nearby palatial Devon residence Silverton Park, (demolished in 1901) was also designed in this style but was never completed.

The house is a square block constructed from stuccoed brick, with stone dressings and has hipped slate roofs with red ridge tiles. It has an arched colonnade or loggia around it on three sides and has two separate sets of stairs on either side so that each half of the house could be accessed independently. These entrance towers were originally 70 feet tall but the top stage of each has been dismantled. There are two service wings around a courtyard and the building is two storeys tall throughout with a total of 60 rooms. There are small square windows on the upper floors designed to resemble the gunports of George Wyndham's ship, HMS Hawke. The central court yard, was covered in a glass dome and acted as a great hall but no longer has any sort of roof. The house has 10 acres of grounds surrounding it.

The house was used as the rectory until 1894 and for some of that time was also a school for local children. In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of mostly Irish students studied with the Rev. William Cookesley Thompson at the house. Around the start of the twentieth century it was rented by an old woman and her daughter. From 1930 to 1939 it was a home for vagrants run by the council and the Church of England. It was a Quaker training centre for conscientious objectors doing relief work during World War II. From 1943 to 1946 or 1947, while still owned by the Quakers, it was used a YHA Youth Hostel known as Spiceland (named after the location of a Friends Meeting House, several miles away in the parish of Uffculme). It became a vehicle breakers' yard in 1951. In 2013 the house was used as a location in a low budget horror movie called In Fear.