"The field with the best view'

From an impeccably renovated terrace of farmworkers’ cottages to a grand old hall, Cornwall's character and beauty are unparalleled

BOUNDED to the east by the River Tamar, which marks the boundary between Devon and Cornwall, sparsely populated North Tamerton-previously located in Devon, but now part of Cornwallis the only parish in the county that includes land east of the Tamar. Medieval North Tamerton, 'the town of the Tamar', which overlooks the confluence of the great river and its tributary, the Deer, is the only village in this landscape of hamlets and farmsteads. Here, in the mid to late 1500s, Leonard Lovis (or Loveys), Elizabeth I's treasurer for Cornwall and Devon, built his grand family seat, Ogbeare Hall.

The 1973 autumn edition of Old Cornwall, published by the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, sets the scene: 'Ogbeare Hall may be approached from the road at nearby Hornacott Chapel. This way winds through woodland, and the first glimpse of the Hall, set a bit below the ridge of the hill, makes it appear somewhat incongruous, as if a Victorian villa from a prosperous suburb had been placed in this somewhat remote Cornish district. The house was indeed rebuilt in Victorian times and subsequently modernised, but it still has at its heart The Great Hall, with its granite fireplace, stone mullioned windows and fine wooden roof, which remind one of Cotehele [near Saltash] or Trecarrol [Trecarrell, at nearby Launceston]. Outside, built into the walls or lying beside them, are stones from the earlier Hall in which lived Leonard Lovis.'

Kelly's Directory of 1889 records that Ogbeare Hall had 'recently been restored and enlarged', presumably by Maj Joseph Holt, who was one of the principal local landowners and lived in the house at that time. According to its 1961 listing entry, Ogbeare Hall, then used as an old people's home, was listed Grade II* and described as being 'encased on the north, south and west sides in a late19th-century Gothic-style gabled house of two storeys with stone mullion windows and a three-storeyed tower with a pyramidal roof.