Prideaux Place

Prideaux Place is an Elizabethan house with extensive grounds and a deer park, high above Padstow, Cornwall, with views over the Camel Estuary.  Built in 1592 by Nicholas Prideaux, the house has been enlarged and modified by succeeding generations of Prideaux's . Significant periods of change occurred in the eighteenth, where the creation of a formal garden and the installation of sash windows and coal burning grates, and in 1810, Reverend Charles Prideaux, altered and extended the house in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style transforming its main rooms and creating the Drawing Room, Hall and Library.

Prideaux Place is filled with family and royal portraits, fine furniture and the Prideaux Porcelain collection. The ceiling in the Great Chamber, was only re-discovered on the 1980's, and is a masterpiece of the Elizabethan plasterer’s art. An odd relic of the Civil War can be found in the Drawing Room: a miniature with a portrait of Charles I on one side and Oliver Cromwell on the other. The grounds are the home to England's oldest cast iron cannon.

Drawings by Edmund Prideaux in the 1730s, are the first records of the gardens  . The gardens were landscaped with hedged walks leading down from the entrance. There are views over the estuary and across to Bodmin Moor. Points of interest were created, including - a classical temple, an obelisk, a grotto and a small stone arbor housing Roman funerary urns whose inscriptions date them back to 50AD.

The deer park is believed to be the oldest in Britain and has been dated back to its enclosure by the Romans in 435AD.

Prideaux Place was the first house in Cornwall to have its own electricity; the generator was installed 1901-02 and the Generator House still stands on the grounds of the House today. The house has 81 rooms, 44 are bedrooms (but only 6 of these bedrooms are habitable today). Many of the other bedrooms are just as Company B of the U.S. Army's 121st Engineer Combat Battalion left them at the end of World War II, after having taken over the house from Oct 12, 1942 until Apr 24, 1944.