Watermouth Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Standing above the small cove of Watermouth, on the north Devon coast between Ilfracombe and Combe Martin, Watermouth Castle was never a fortress: it is a 19th-century country house designed to evoke a castle, with turrets, a clock tower and crenellated parapets. Built in 1825-1826 for the Basset family on the site of an earlier Palladian house, it was completed in 1845 and has been listed Grade II*. The Bassets lived there until the mid-20th century. During the First World War, the house served as a convalescent home for wounded officers; during the Second, it housed a headquarters linked to Operation PLUTO, the project for pipelines under the English Channel. It is also from this lineage that Walter Basset came, the engineer of the giant Ferris wheel at the Prater in Vienna. Left almost abandoned after the Bassets' departure, the castle was bought in 1977 by the Haines family, who restored it and turned it into a family attraction. Operated since 2023 by the Escapade Group, it combines tours of the Victorian apartments and kitchens, collections of antique objects, rides and holiday apartments.