Bowhill Manor is a house in the Saint Thomas Parish of Exeter which inspired a house I described in Plague of a Green Man, the second novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries. The actual house was started in 1422, some 42 years after the time of my novel, but visiting this house gave me ideas for Reliant Cottage, the house of Phyllis of Bath in my story.
Saint Thomas Parish was across the River Exe from the walled medieval city of Exeter in 1380, the year of my novel. In the story, Lady Apollonia wished to visit Phyllis in her home and stopped at the parish church on the way to visit Phyllis. The church was a chapel on the far end of the bridge over the Exe in 1380. Four years later, that version of the parish church was washed away in a flood. Afterwards, it was rebuilt away from the river and remains there to the present.
Bowhill Manor is located on Dunsford Hill along the main road heading west south-west from the medieval bridge in the general direction of Dartmoor. The house has largely been in private hands over the centuries, but was restored in the 20th century by English Heritage. To get a current assessment of the building, click on
http://www.drewpearce.co.uk/_assets/images/commercial/6413%20bowhill/details%2060-3041%20bowhill%20house.pdf .
Bowhill is built around a courtyard. Perhaps its most striking feature is its great hall with its barrel-vaulted roof, meaning the vault at the top of the roof forms a half cylinder. A picture of the barrel-vaulted roof is shown above. On one end of the great hall is storage space on two levels with the upper level being not as high as the great hall. A wooden screen is on the other end of the great hall, separating it from the parlour which has with a solar above it. These are the kinds of spaces visited by my heroine, the Lady Apollonia, in Reliant Cottage.
In Bowhill, itself, the buttery is next as one moves clockwise around the house. Then comes a storage room, a passage to the courtyard, the south-range kitchen, and finally the main kitchen.
Tags: Chaucer's England, historical fiction, medieval mysteries