Click on photos to enlarge
Notes in italics from Devon by Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner (1989)
Yale University Press, New Haven and London

The pre-Conquest foundation of secular canons attached to the church of St Nectan had by 1169 been re-established ... New abbey buildings were erected in a sheltered valley some way from the exposed site of the parish church ... The existing house, as so often, occupies the site of the W range of the abbot's quarters.

Of the medieval buildings little is evident ... The cloister itself had been re-built in the C14 by Abbot John Buckerell (1308-29), as is known from a surviving Latin inscription reset in the E wall of the present house, together with fragments of the trefoiled arcades and their Purbeck marble columns. ... At the time of the Dissolution there were only four canons. In 1546 the abbey was granted to William Abbott, Sergeant to the King's Cellar, whose descendants are still the owners. They adapted the W range as their house. ... But in 1779 the house was transformed for the then owner, Paul Orchard, by the architect John Meadows. On the W side .. the centre now has a sober C18 front, the windows with Gothic glazing bars. On the E side he created a happy gimcrack Gothic composition: nine bays with pointed windows and a castellated parapet rising to a central pediment ... One-storey bay-windows, also crenellated. ...

St Nectan Church, Hartland

Map