Pack o' Cards
| Pack o' Cards | |
|
Devon | |
|---|---|
 The Pack o' Cards, Combe Martin | |
| Type: | Public house |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | SS58344672 |
| Location: | 51°12’7"N, 4°1’45"W |
| Village: | Combe Martin |
| History | |
| Built c. 1690 | |
| For: | George Ley |
| Public house | |
| Information | |
| Website: | www.packocards.co.uk |
The Pack o' Cards is a late seventeenth century historic house, of extraordinary conception, which stands on the long High Street in Combe Martin in northern Devon. Today it is a public house and hotel,[1] and for its historic interest it is also a Grade II* listed building.[2]
The Pack o' Cards was built in about 1690 by local 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[3] on a plot of land measuring 52 × 53 feet, representing the cards in a pack plus the joker.
The building has four floors, representing the four suits, with thirteen 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, the panes in all the windows added up to the total value of a pack of cards.[1]
History
The house was built in about 1690 by George Ley. Eventually the house passed out of the hands of the Ley family. It is not certain when exactly the building became an inn, but 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 is recorded as the landlady. In 1831 Jane Huxtable offered it for sale.
The hotel is said to have been visited by the author Marie Corelli, 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.[4] 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.[1]
In spite of 20th-century alterations, much of the joinery and moulded cornices 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.[2] Nikolaus Pevsner 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".[5]
On television
The hotel featured on The Paul Daniels Magic Show on BBC television in 1987.
Pictures
-
The side entrance to the Pack o' Cards -
The original Coach House
Outside links
 |
("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Pack o' Cards) |
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 The Pack o' Cards - history
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 National Heritage List 1169072: The Pack of Cards including courtyard walls incorporating bee boles on north-west side
- ↑ The Pack O' Cards Inn - Combe Martin North Devon Holidays
- ↑ Marie Corelli and Combe Martin - Exmoor National Park website
- ↑ Nikolaus Pevsner: The Buildings of England: Devon, 1952; 1989 Penguin Books ISBN 978-0-300-09596-8page 76