Twelve glorious acres of manicured grounds surround partly Elizabethan Flete House, former seat of the Mildmay family, which overlooks Ermington and Dartmoor, enjoying ‘probably the finest situation in Devonshire’ according to Cornish poet and historian Richard Polwhele (1797).

At Holbeton in the South Hams, not far from Georgian Modbury, it was used as a maternity hospital in the Second World War and has now been converted into 29 apartments, retaining the principal rooms (library, dining, drawing and billiard rooms and others) for communal use, exclusively for over 55s.



