The Pack o' Cards is a historic house built about 1690 in

Combe Martin Combe Martin () is a village, Civil parishes in England, civil parish and former Manorialism, manor on the North Devon coast about east of Ilfracombe. It is a small seaside resort with a sheltered cove on the northwest edge of the Exmoor Nati ...

North Devon North Devon is a Non-metropolitan district, local government district in Devon, England. Its council is based just outside Barnstaple, the district's largest town. The district also includes the towns of Ilfracombe, Lynton and Lynmouth and Sout ...

. Today it is a

public house A pub (short for public house) is in several countries a drinking establishment licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption Licensing laws of the United Kingdom#On-licence, on the premises. The term first appeared in England in the ...

and hotel. It is listed Grade II* on the

National Heritage List for England The National Heritage List for England (NHLE) is England's official database of protected heritage assets. It includes details of all English listed buildings, scheduled monuments, register of historic parks and gardens, protected shipwrecks, ...

. Located on the long High Street in Combe Martin, the building was constructed in about 1690 by local

squire In the Middle Ages, a squire was the shield- or armour-bearer of a knight. Boys served a knight as an attendant, doing simple but important tasks such as saddling a horse or caring for the knight's weapons and armour. Terminology ''Squire'' ...

George Ley, who, it is said, celebrated his good luck at card games when, after winning a large sum of money, he built a house to represent a

house of cards A house of cards (also known as a card tower or card castle) is a structure created by stacking playing cards on top of each other, often in the shape of a pyramid. "House of cards" is also an expression that dates back to 1645 meaning a struc ...

on a plot of land measuring 52 × 53

feet The foot (: feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is an organ at the terminal part of the leg made up of ...

, representing the cards in a pack plus the joker. It has four floors representing the four suits, with 13 doors and fireplaces on each floor equaling the number of cards in each suit, and fifty-two stairs. Before the imposition of the

window tax Window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. It was a significant social, cultural, and architectural force in England, Scotland, France and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries. To avoid the tax, some houses fr ...

, the panes in all the windows added up to the total value of a pack of cards. Eventually the house passed out of the hands of the Ley family, but it is not certain when exactly the building became an inn. Records show that it was serving that function early in the 19th century, when in 1822 it was called the King's Arms Inn and a Jane Huxtable was the landlady. It was offered for sale in 1831 by the same name. The hotel is said to have been visited by the author

Marie Corelli Mary Mackay (1 May 185521 April 1924), also called Minnie Mackey and known by her pseudonym Marie Corelli (, also , ), was an English novelist. From the appearance of her first novel '' A Romance of Two Worlds'' in 1886, she became a bestselli ...

, who supposedly wrote part of her novel ''The Mighty Atom'' (1896) in the "Corelli Room" on the third floor, at a desk still preserved in her room. The inn was renamed the Pack o' Cards on 1 June 1933, but it had probably been known by that name for many years before that date. In spite of 20th-century alterations, much of the joinery and moulded

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative Moulding (decorative), moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, ar ...

s in the ground floor have survived. The first and second floors are largely original and untouched, with decorative plaster ceilings to the main first floor room in the left-hand wing and to the through-corridor. Both corridors are panelled, as is the central room on the third floor, where Marie Corelli is said to have stayed. All the principal rooms have moulded plaster cornices, while good quality panelled joinery survives throughout the building.

Nikolaus Pevsner 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'' (195 ...

describes it as the only noteworthy building in the village, being "a rare folly, built on a cruciform plan with a towering display of symmetrically grouped chimneys, eight together".

, ''The Buildings of England: North Devon'',

Penguin Books Penguin Books Limited is a Germany, German-owned English publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers the Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the ...

(1952) p. 76. The hotel featured on ''

The Paul Daniels Magic Show ''The Paul Daniels Magic Show'' was a British magic show presented by entertainer and magician Paul Daniels that aired on BBC1 from 9 June 1979 to 18 June 1994. Daniels' assistant throughout the series was Debbie McGee Debra Ann McGee (born 3 ...

'' on

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

television in 1987. The Pack o' Cards remains an inn and has been a Grade II* listed building since 1953.

Gallery

File:Pack o' Cards entrance.jpg, The side entrance to the Pack o' Cards File:Pack o' Cards Coach House.jpg, The original Coach House

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Pack o' Cards Grade II* listed pubs in Devon Grade II* listed houses Houses completed in 1690 North Devon