In the neighbouring County of Devonshire, near Broadclyst, is Killerton House.

Killerton House near Broadclyst in Devonshire in the autumn of 2014.

For me, a visit to Killerton House in Devonshire involves a very pleasant drive over the Blackdown Hills towards Cullompton to pick up the B3181 (the old A38) and head south.  Killerton is well signposted and only a short distance west from the main road.  If you reach Broadclyst you will have gone a couple of miles too far!  The car park is within what appears to be an old walled garden: I have always found parking there easy and convenient.

Strangely enough I have never actually been inside Killerton House or even had a cup of tea in the restaurant or café.  I always seem to spend the entire visit wandering around the gardens and park taking advantage of the many well-sited benches to rest or enjoy the bucolic views of the estate and beyond. 

Darrell Bates states in his The Companion Guide to Devon and Cornwall (Collins, 1976):  “The present mansion is eighteenth century, and was the home of the Acland family but the house and its fine garden of shrubs and trees and the splendid park are now in the hands of the National Trust.  Although Killerton garden has some truly magnificent rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias, and many exotic trees, none surpass the magnificence of the domestic oaks and beeches in the park.”

An ancient tree on the Killerton House estate.

Sir Richard Thomas Dyke Acland, fifteenth baronet (1906-1990)*, gave the 6,400 acre Killerton Estate, together with the even larger 12,000 acre Holnicote Estate in West Somerset, to the National Trust in 1944.  He advocated the public ownership of land and obviously practised what he preached.

Sir Richard was a left wing, liberal, socialist who had an interesting and varied career in Parliament spanning twenty years.  He was elected as Liberal MP for Barnstable in 1935 but broke with Liberals in 1942 to help found the Common Wealth Party.  By 1945 the Party had won 4 seats in by-elections but lost them all in the general election of that year.  In 1947 he won, as a Labour Party candidate, the by-election for Gravesend and returned to the House of Commons but resigned his seat in 1955 in protest against the Party’s support of the British Nuclear Deterrent.  He subsequently helped to form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Always a stalwart protector of Devonshire’s countryside and traditions, including stag-hunting – an unusual stance for someone with such “left wing” views - he died at his home in Broadclyst on November 24 1990.

Sources

*A. F. Thompson, ‘Acland, Sir Richard Thomas Dyke, fifteenth baronet (1906–1990)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39848, accessed 28 Jan 2017]