Castle Drogo

Devon is blessed with a good number of National Trust and English Heritage properties and vast stretches of land available to walk - the South West Coast Path being a prime example where the Trust owns significant stretches. Numerous grand country houses and castles are an attraction for local residents and visitors alike.

With a deep interest in English history, a passion for architecture and living for many years on Dartmoor I was able to enjoy with family and friends the properties on my doorstep – one in particular – Castle Drogo, Chagford. An imposing Grade 1 building set high above the River Teign on the eastern edge of the Dartmoor National Park and commanding amazing views across the Moor. To the uninitiated any castle in England would assume to have been built as far back as a thousand years with many in the 15 th to 17 th centuries. Not so, Castle Drogo. It was the last castle to be built in England being completed in 1930.

Mr. Julius Drewe was the founder and owner of Home and Colonial Stores and, alongside Thomas Lipton and John Sainsbury, one of the great retail giants of the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. He decided that he wished to build a castle and purchased about 450 acres of land which had been owned many centuries earlier by someone he believed to be his ancestor, Drogo de Teigne, hence the name Julius commissioned the well known architect, Edwin Lutyens, then at the height of his professional career. Lutyens would have much preferred a commission to build Mr. Drewe an elegant country house and on 3 August 1910, wrote to his wife: “I do wish he did not want a castle but a delicious lovely house with plenty of good rooms in it.” 

However as a self made millionaire, and the person paying all the bills, Julius Drewe got his way. The building of the castle began in 1911 with an original budget of £50,000 for the dwelling and £10,000 for the garden. The castle was built entirely of granite and incorporated some interesting features including a portcullis above which is a heraldic Drewe lion, battlements, turrets and was designed, regrettably as it later turned out, without any window sills. This rather stark medieval looking fortress also incorporated a number of modern features including state of the art bathrooms, a sophisticated central vacuum cleaning process which sucked dust in to cavities in the walls, a telephone exchange in the Library and a dumb waiter to bring food up from the Kitchen to the Dining Room. The property had a private electricity supply sourced from hydro-electric turbines in the River Teign hundreds of feet below the castle.

The Castle took much longer to build than was originally envisaged, not being completed until 1930, went way over budget and was completed to about one third the size of Lutyen’s original drawings. Much like most Grand Designs today!

As with a number of Lutyens’ other architectural commissions he asked his friend Gertrude Jekyll to advise on the layout of a garden which is set some distance from the castle and is today well stocked with herbaceous borders. Julius Drewe managed to increase the acreage of his Devon estate and when he died in 1931 it had increased to about 1,500 acres. Members of his family gave the property to the National Trust in 1974 who maintain and care for the property today.

One of the best ways to approach the Castle is to walk from The Mill End Hotel via the Hunters Path up to the Castle and then to continue down to Fingle Bridge for a drink at The Anglers Rest and to then return along The Fisherman’s Path, passing the salmon leap along the way and perhaps pausing for a refreshing ‘wild swim ‘ in one of the deep pools.