When we looked at this house, on the suggestion of one of our visitors, it quickly became clear that it is only part of something that was once much larger, fragments of which appear in the walls and outbuildings around it. These, it turned out, are the remains of a remarkable school, almost the first to be founded by a woman.

Moreover, the woman who founded it, Thomasine Bonaventure, was herself remarkable. Though born here in Cornwall, she married, in turn, three London merchants, each of whom died leaving her his property. This she gave or left to charity, amongst many other benefactions, founding this school in 1506 at the place of her birth.

To oversee the building work, Thomasine appointed her first cousin, John Dinham of Wortham Manor, 12 miles away and today also a Landmark (see Wortham Manor). He remodelled his own house at about the same time, and the two buildings have much in common – notably their carved granite doorways.

Unfortunately, Thomasine also decreed that the master (with an Oxford or a Cambridge degree, and six weeks holiday a year) should pray for the souls of her husbands, a practice firmly disapproved of by the new Protestant regime; and so, as a chantry, it was dissolved two years later. Thus the College at Week St Mary, one of the oldest English schools, prosperously founded, survives only in its name, which still clings to this house more than 300 years later.

The College faces a small courtyard off the village street. Behind it a meadow slopes down to a chequer-work of little fields, and over them appears, black and afar, the high outline of Dartmoor, beyond which Thomasine ventured to such purpose.

Sleeps: 5