Whiddon is an historic estate in the parish of

Chagford Chagford is a market town and civil parish on the north-east edge of Dartmoor, in Devon, England, close to the River Teign and the A382, 4 miles (6 km) west of Moretonhampstead. The name is derived from ''chag'', meaning gorse or broom, and ...

Devon Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devon is ...

, England. The

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals w ...

, now known as Whiddon Park House, survives as a remnant of the larger 16th-century mansion house of the Whiddon family.Cherry & Pevsner, p. 251. The house displays the date 1649 inscribed above the inner doorway. The manor house is now the property of the

National Trust The National Trust, formally the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, there is a separate and ...

and is let for a nominal rent, but on a full repairing and insuring lease expiring on 17 January 2079. The deer park, which is bounded by a wall built of massive

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...

blocks at the entrance to the

Teign Gorge Teigne (also : Teign, Tègne, Teeñ, Tin or Tañ in Wolof language) was the title of the monarch of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Baol, now part of present-day Senegal. In Wolof, "Teigne" means the support that is placed on the head to carry som ...

, was built by Sir

John Whiddon Sir John Whiddon (died 27 January 1576) of Whiddon in the parish of Chagford in Devon, was a Justice of the Queen's Bench from 4 October 1553 to his death on 27 January 1576, during the reigns of Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I. Personal lif ...

(died 1576), a

Justice of the King's Bench Justice of the King's Bench, or Justice of the Queen's Bench during the reign of a female monarch, was a puisne judicial position within the Court of King's Bench, under the Chief Justice. The King's Bench was a court of common law which modern ...

. His monument survives in St Michael's Church, Chagford.Cherry & Pevsner, p. 250.

References

;Sources * Cherry, Bridget &

Pevsner, Nikolaus Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (1 ...

, ''The Buildings of England: Devon''. Yale University Press, 2004. {{ISBN, 978-0-300-09596-8.

References

Further reading