Dwellings in the Past: Lifting the roof off the Devon Rural Archive
By Jane Currall I
t’s all in the name. The Devon Rural Archive is a unique local resource dedicated to the research of Devon’s historic rural architecture and connected landscapes. Appositely, its location is also about
as rural as you can get in this ultra bucolic area, hid- den as it is in a secluded valley between Modbury and California Cross that is home to Shilstone House and Gardens, itself an immensely fascinating proper- ty with a history dating back to Neolithic times. The Archive’s ageless location belies its contem-
porary, purpose-built, timbered premises. Delightful resident archaeologist Abi Gray con- ducts a tour of the bespoke facilities which include two exhibition rooms and a lecture room on the ground floor and upstairs a suite of offices and the library itself, a spacious, pleasant, open plan room, where the Archive collections are housed. Southwards the windows offer a lofty view of Shilstone House and gardens nestling in the valley below. The views are mesmeric. One could easily spend hours here, totally absorbed, at peace and quite oblivious of time … Yes well, back to rational matters and the reason
for my visit – to find out more about the Devon Rural Archive (DRA) whose threshold I’ve never had the pleasure of crossing before. Abi explains about its inception. Entirely funded by the Fenwick Charitable Trust, the Devon Rural Archive was set up in 2006,
originally in order to facilitate ‘Project Donn’ – a research study into the architectural histories of the ‘Donn Houses’. The Donn Houses What on earth are the Donn Houses, you may well ask? And why are they particularly interesting? Well, the Donn Houses are so called after an eighteenth century Devon-born cartographer called Benjamin Donn. In 1765, after an extensive series of surveys, Donn produced an enormous (wall-sized), extremely detailed and highly accurate map of Devon. It was the first of its kind and set a standard for future cartographic surveys. Abi explains further: “Included in the
many items of interest noted on the map were all the houses that Donn deemed particularly significant. He was a bit of a snob and really only interested in the grandest properties. But conducting the
surveys was expensive work, so any householder, if they could afford it and who fancied marking their home for posterity, could pay Donn to put their property on the map. If a householder did pay the several shillings, Donn added their name underneath the name of their house. So the map also serves as a register of householders around the time of 1765, which is also extremely useful when researching the history of local families.” It so happens that Shilstone itself is one of those
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