Berry Pomeroy Castle

Berry Pomeroy Castle is a ruined defended residence and a later mansion on a limestone outcrop above the wooded valley of the Gatcombe Brook, in the parish of Berry Pomeroy in South Devon. It stands about one mile, or 1.6 kilometres, north-east of the village, and also about one kilometre north-east of the village and three kilometres east of Totnes, while an older schedule places it two miles east of Totnes. The outcrop looks over a deep, narrow valley. A modern wooded drive of about half a mile, or 800 metres, runs beside an earlier drive that survives as an earthwork in the woods, and the car park occupies the quarry that supplied much of the slate used in the Pomeroy buildings.

The land came to the family after the Norman Conquest. That conquest was the invasion of 1066 led by William, Duke of Normandy, later William the Conqueror. Edward the Confessor had died in January 1066 and was succeeded by his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson. Harald Hardrada of Norway invaded the north, won at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September.

William’s fleet landed at Pevensey on 28 September. Harold, who had left part of his army in the north, met him at Hastings on 14 October and was killed. William was not secure on the throne until after 1072. He granted lands to his followers and raised castles at strong points.

The survey later called the Domesday Book was completed by 1086. One account says Ralf de la Pomerai acquired Berry Pomeroy in 1066. Another says William granted the manor of Berri to Ralf de Pomaria, a Norman knight from La Pommeraye near Falaise. The same man is also called Ralph de la Pomeroy and the family de la Pomerais.

The Domesday record of 1086 shows the de la Pomeroy family holding the feudal barony of Berry Pomeroy shortly after the conquest. Tenurial records of the Pomeroy lands in Devon and Cornwall, running from the twelfth century to the middle of the sixteenth, include Berry Pomeroy and make no apparent reference to a castle.

In 1166 the barony consisted of almost thirty-two knight’s fees, each fee roughly a manor, and Berry was the head of that barony. Early documents speak of a capital messuage at Berry, the head house of the manor. Henry Pomeroy enclosed a deer park here in 1207. The castle was later built inside that existing park, on a site that archaeology has found to have been previously unused, more than a mile north-east of the village church.

The Pomeroys’ older house stood by the church and was still in full use in 1496. The manor house near the churchyard gate, now a private residence, is thought to stand on that earlier site, and it contains two sixteenth-century doorcases that match the dimensions and style of doorcases still in the castle. A crown survey of 1292 recorded a manor house, and one architectural description treats that survey as evidence that no castle stood on the present site before about 1300.

The date of the fortress itself is disputed, and the disagreement is the central fact of its history. The oldest standing parts are the gatehouse, St Margaret’s Tower, and the curtain wall between them. The gunports in the gatehouse and in St Margaret’s Tower are the evidence used for a late fifteenth-century date, and the castle has been called one of the last traditional personal castles in the country, set on a favoured spot inside the deer park. It is now read as a later fifteenth-century fortress on a previously unused site.

The founder may have been Henry Pomeroy, who held Berry Pomeroy from 1461 until 1487, or his heir, Sir Richard Pomeroy. A foundation, or at least a completion, by Sir Richard is made more likely by artillery defences of a broadly similar kind going up at Dartmouth Castle in the 1480s, and by the very late fifteenth-century wall painting in the gatehouse. The foundation is placed only between 1461 and 1496, and most probably in the latter part of that span. The precise year is still unknown.

Older descriptions give a much earlier castle. A guidebook of about 1940 said that every portion of the ruins encircling the interior was the work of the de Pomeroy on whom the Conqueror bestowed the manor after the invasion of 1066. A schedule of 1922 said the castle was originally erected, it was said, by Ralph de la Pomeroy, who received the manor at the conquest, and it marked the older walls as possibly Norman and the gateway as thirteenth-century. A survey of visits in 1951, 1952 and 1953 called the remains a thirteenth- to sixteenth-century fortified mansion, supposed a defensive building on a Norman mount, and treated the gatehouse, St Margaret’s Tower, the southern curtain, and part of the western wall as the only thirteenth-century work.

The listed-building description dates the gatehouse to about 1300, says there is no evidence of a castle here before about 1300, and says the de la Pomerais built the existing fortified castle about 1300. The monument is also classed across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from 1401 to 1600. Excavation later found no buildings earlier than the late fifteenth century.

The motive for so strong a house is placed in the disturbed state of Devon, then called the most lawless area of southern England. Local feuds, escalating from 1455 into the conflict later known as the Wars of the Roses, involved the Pomeroys on the Yorkist side. The fortifications are read as designed for serious defence. At the same time a later survey judged that the castle had little, if any, military strategic significance, and that it was built primarily as a grand family seat of traditional castle status, a second residence whose role included that of a hunting lodge.

The gunports deepen that puzzle. They belong to the private fortress of a family that was not outstandingly wealthy or influential, on a site that commanded no strategic route and was not threatened by raids from foreign enemies. The reason for such numerous, elaborate and advanced artillery defences, the name of the designer, and whether Sir Richard Pomeroy had links with Flanders or Germany that would explain a European designer, are all still open.

Under the Pomeroys the castle had a dry moat, now mostly filled in, a gatehouse, and ramparts carrying a curtain wall, with buildings set around the inside of the wall. A small section of the ditch is still recognisable beside St Margaret’s Tower. Very few remains show exactly where those first internal buildings stood, because of later remodelling. The first written castle is the death of Sir Richard Pomeroy in 1496, when he was owner of the honour, castle and manor of Bury.

In November 1496 his inquisition and the assignment of dower to his widow, Elizabeth, give the first recorded mention and a short description: the gatehouse that still survives, a great chamber, four other chambers, and a kitchen. Elizabeth, widow of Richard Pomeroy, was assigned a third of both the castle and the capital messuage, and the document makes clear that those two were on different sites. The messuage is now thought to have been on or near the site of Berry House in the village. Another reading of that same 1496 wording names various chambers, a kitchen, and a gate.

The gatehouse stands on the south, with a round-arched gateway flanked by large semi-hexagonal towers, joined by a flattened arch of machicolation on corbels. Above the gateway, in the guardroom, is a sixteenth-century arcade with octagonal piers and chamfered arches. The gatehouse also contained a chapel. St Margaret’s Tower projects at the east corner, or at the north-east end, with a semicircular outer wall.

Nothing of the crenellation survives. An engraving of the south view made in 1734 shows that tower still full height, with battlements, and that is the one detail in which the engraving differs from the tower’s present appearance. The curtain is incomplete. The walls are coursed stone with freestone dressings.

The most remarkable military features are the gunports, and above all the ports for several guns in the basement of St Margaret’s Tower. All three have outer as well as inner splays, so that the guns could traverse more widely, a feature not imitated elsewhere in England until Camber Castle, built in 1512 to 1514. The south-facing port, made for three guns of graduated sizes, is the only known example of that design outside Germany. It was meant to let three guns of different sizes cover the approaches to the south wall and the gatehouse.

In 1978 a worker caught a glimpse of a face under a thick growth of moss and ivy in the upper storey of the gatehouse. Specialists uncovered a wall painting of the Adoration of the Magi, the visit of the Three Magi to the infant Christ, dated to about 1490 to 1500 on its likeness to European work of that time. It includes one of the earliest depictions in England of a black Wise Man, a fashion that spread from Germany and the Low Countries in the late fifteenth century. The style is that of Antwerp, and the painting is thought likely to be the work of an English imitator, using a developed range of pigments that includes vermilion, red lead, and copper green.

The same Antwerp manner has been traced in the figures on the painted screen in Berry Pomeroy church, which Sir Richard Pomeroy rebuilt before 1496. The church holds his altar tomb. He probably built the castle and he certainly rebuilt the church. The late fifteenth-century rood screen has twenty-four painted panels of saints, now much defaced, in a Flemish Antwerp style, and they may be by the same hand as the gatehouse painting.

In 1981 the gatehouse was still an ivy-clad, roofless ruin. Clearance of the ivy revealed the painting, and the building was given a roof in 1982, a modern reconstruction, to protect it. A condition audit of the painting was made in 1997.

The Tudor period, from 1485 to 1603, is the span in which this fortress was begun and then turned into a house. It runs from the accession of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I, and it includes the Elizabethan years. Population in England is put at about 2.3 million in 1520 and at almost double that, 4 million, by 1600, after the Black Death of 1348 and a late fifteenth-century agricultural depression. Before the plague the population has been estimated at 4 to 6 million.

Wages that had been high, with land abundant, gave way to low wages and a shortage of land. Inflation, perhaps from New World gold and from the rising population, widened the gap between rich and poor, and lords began to enclose village lands that had been open. The religious break is the great theme of those years. Henry VIII replaced the pope as head of the Church of England while keeping most Catholic doctrine.

His son imposed a strict Protestant settlement. Mary tried to restore Catholicism. Elizabeth settled on a compromise. The castle’s change of family sits inside that national break, not as a local reformation of the building.

In December 1547 the impoverished Sir Thomas Pomeroy sold Berry Pomeroy to Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset. The sale is also dated 1547, and 1548, and an older schedule says the duke became possessor when Sir Thomas Pomeroy’s property was confiscated in 1549. The estate was Somerset’s most valuable single acquisition, and only one of many properties he gathered. Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, also 1st Earl of Hertford and 1st Viscount Beauchamp, was born about 1500 and died on 22 January 1552.

He was the eldest surviving brother of Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII and the mother of Edward VI. He was knighted on 1 November 1523, became an Esquire of the Body in 1529, was created Viscount Beauchamp on 5 June 1536, and Earl of Hertford on 15 October 1537. Jane died on 24 October 1537. On Henry’s death he was appointed protector by the regency council.

Edward VI, born on 12 October 1537 at Hampton Court and christened on 15 October, was king of England and Ireland from 28 January 1547 until his death on 6 July 1553. He was crowned on 20 February 1547 at the age of nine, the only surviving son of Henry VIII by Jane, and the first English monarch raised as a Protestant. His mother had died on 24 October 1537, days after the birth. The realm was governed by a council because he never reached maturity.

That council was led first by his uncle, the duke, from 1547 to 1549, and then by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, from 1550 to 1553.

Somerset continued the war against the Scots and won a victory at the Battle of Pinkie, but he could not hold his position in Scotland. In 1549 he imposed the first Book of Common Prayer through the Act of Uniformity. Unpopular religious measures and agrarian grievances produced uprisings, among them the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion. Costly wars and economic mismanagement brought the crown towards financial ruin.

In October 1549 he was forced from power and imprisoned in the Tower by Dudley and a group of privy councillors. He was later released and reconciled, then accused of treason in 1551 and executed in January 1552, beheaded on that charge. His lands were forfeit to the crown. It was not until 1558, after complex property dealings, that his son by his first marriage, Lord Edward Seymour, gained title to this castle.

Because of doubts about that son’s legitimacy, and because of the alleged adultery of the duke’s first wife, the dukedom was entailed in preference to the sons of the second marriage. The junior branch kept the principal lands and titles. The senior line at Berry Pomeroy was sidelined, and the annoyance of that exclusion has been offered as a reason for the ambitious building that followed.

There is no good evidence that Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, ever visited, and his ownership was short. The belief that he transformed a Norman castle into a Tudor mansion between 1547 and 1552 is now rejected, though versions of it persist. A county castle account still says the lavish rebuilding was begun by him and left incomplete at his execution in 1552. The mansion inside the walls is otherwise credited to his son.

Lord Edward Seymour, born in 1529 and died in 1593, is called the first of this family to settle in Devon. He became a considerable landowner, High Sheriff of Devon in 1583, and a justice of the peace in 1591. Between 1560 and 1580 he removed the earlier Pomeroy buildings inside the walls and built a new four-storey house, in the fashion of the time, at the north end of the courtyard. The shell of that house survives mostly to its original height.

He probably began it in the early 1560s, perhaps about the time he was summoned to Elizabeth’s court in 1562. An east range, filling the fourth side of the inner court, had been added by about 1590. The house was comparatively modest, but compact and very tall, with two complete floors of living rooms above two more that held the hall and the services. The listed description dates the Seymour house and offices to about 1575 to 1593, and says he lived here from 1575 to 1593.

It describes a symmetrical three-storey, five-bay front, a central doorway, and stone-mullioned windows of four lights with hoodmoulds, the principal first-floor windows taller and transomed. The outer, north-east wall has mullioned windows, and the east corner is crenellated. The remains of the Tudor mansion are also described as standing four storeys high to roof level. The courtyard house is read as a pioneering example, in Devon, of the tall, compact, comparatively unadorned houses of the later Elizabethan and Jacobean years.

Nothing like it had been seen in the county. Seymour may have been influenced by his father’s associates, among them William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and Sir Nicholas Poyntz, a relation by marriage. The surviving east front of Poyntz’s hunting lodge at Newark Park in Gloucestershire, of about 1550, resembles Seymour’s original entrance front.

After Sir Edward’s death in 1593 the lands passed to his son, another Edward, born about 1563 and died in 1613, who is also placed as the man who added the north range. In the first decade of the seventeenth century he began to turn his father’s mansion into what was called a very stately house, comparable with the great houses then rising elsewhere. Thomas Risdon’s survey mentions that creation in about 1632. The work replaced the old north range with a grand staircase and galleries leading to new rooms in the east range, and it raised a new north wing of three storeys, extending beyond the old defences.

The wing held a hall fronted by a loggia in the Renaissance manner, a kitchen, a long gallery on the top floor, and family and guest apartments. Terraces were begun at both ends, and another was planned on the north-west, looking over ponds in the valley, but they were abandoned before completion. A further service range was planned to run over the filled moat on the west and was never started. A level area terraced into the lower slope south-east of the mansion may be part of a garden, or the site of an ancillary building that does not survive inside the walls.

The north wing was only a little shorter than the entrance front at Longleat, or the central range at Hatfield, which also has an arched loggia. The east front at Audley End has a loggia with two storeys above it, but this north wing was more than twice as long. The long gallery was among the lengthiest built in England. A reconstruction of the castle at its height, about 1600 to 1610, shows that north wing with its arcaded loggia and an unfinished west wing.

Tree-ring analysis dates the main work on the north wing to the years around 1600. A lintel timber from the kitchen gave a felling date of 1591 to 1601. The designer is not recorded. He may have been Robert Smythson, the leading master mason of the time, or, as the more likely of the two names proposed, William Arnold, his West Country counterpart.

No document establishes either name. By June 1611 Edward was in serious financial trouble. A month later he bought a baronetcy. He died in April 1613, also given simply as 1613, as Sir Edward Seymour, first baronet, of Berry Pomeroy, with the great house unfinished and never to be completed.

Building had come to an abrupt halt. His monument is in St Mary’s Church, Berry Pomeroy. The early seventeenth-century Seymour monument there is described as erected for Sir Edward Seymour II, second baronet, and also as the memorial of the Edward who died in 1613. At the top is Edward, Lord Seymour, builder of the Elizabethan mansion, with a baton emphasising descent from the Protector.

Below are Edward Seymour II and his wife Elizabeth. The two flanking columns, with strapwork pedestals, are almost identical to the columns of the castle loggia, and the monument is thought almost certainly to have been carved by masons who worked at the castle.

The next generations did not finish the wing. Sir Edward Seymour, second baronet, son of the man who died in 1613, was Governor of Dartmouth, a member of parliament, and was knighted in 1603. He was much involved in shipping and lived in style at the castle until the English Civil War. One set of dates makes this second baronet about 1572 to 1659, and calls him Sir Edward Seymour III, while the father who died in 1613 is called Edward Seymour II and dated about 1563 to 1613.

Those two birth dates sit close together for a father and a son, and they are left as they are given. The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, was the series of wars and political struggles between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms from 1639 to 1653. The first war was fought over the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I and ended in June 1646 with the king in custody. The second war, in 1648, ended in Royalist defeat, the execution of Charles I in January 1649, and the Commonwealth.

Charles II was crowned in Scotland in 1650. The war with Scotland ended at Worcester on 3 September 1651. The Restoration came in 1660. Royalists were called Cavaliers and Parliamentarians Roundheads.

This Edward sided with the Royalists. He was captured, and while he was imprisoned in London the castle was raided by Parliamentarians. His estates were sequestered by Cromwell, but he was allowed to stay at the castle, and he died here in 1659. His son, later the third baronet, also a Royalist, was appointed a colonel in 1642, imprisoned in Exeter in the latter part of the war, and not released until 1655.

Another account says the castle itself was never garrisoned or attacked. A study of the Royalist effort concerns Edward Seymour and the garrison at Dartmouth in 1643 and 1644, which is a garrison at the port, not a statement that this house was held as a fortress. Compounding records exist for Sir Edward Seymours III and IV. The same account says that only by adroit manoeuvring, and by the help of the colonel’s wife Anne, was Berry Pomeroy kept out of government hands during the Commonwealth, and that Charles II highly honoured Sir Edward’s loyalty after the Restoration.

The colonel dispensed a famous hospitality here to all comers and stayed in government service into his seventies. He is Sir Edward IV in one numbering, dated 1610 to 1688, and the third baronet in the other. On his death in 1688 an inventory of the castle was drawn up. It shows a house of around fifty rooms.

The buildings were likely in poor repair, because of the expense he had incurred for the Royalist cause. The inventory is also read as showing that the family had retreated into an updated version of the old Elizabethan mansion, and had made no attempt to finish the Jacobean wing.

His son is Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Baronet, born in 1632 or 1633 and died on 17 February 1708. He was born at Berry Pomeroy Castle, the eldest son of Sir Edward Seymour, 3rd Baronet, and Anne Portman, and a descendant of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, in the senior line. He is the same man called Sir Edward Seymour V, dated 1633 to 1708, and known as Speaker Seymour. The castle narrative says he was aged fifty-five when his father died in 1688.

His mother, Lady Anne, stayed in the castle until she died in 1694. Because an inventory exists from 1688, the house has been called very comfortable at the moment he inherited, and the vicar John Prince used the word splendid for it. Prince was vicar of Totnes from 1675 to 1681 and of Berry Pomeroy from 1681 to 1723, and he was effectively the family’s chaplain. Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Baronet, had quarrelled bitterly with both parents as a young man.

His politics were in London. He first sat in Parliament in 1661 for Hindon in Wiltshire, near Maiden Bradley, where Bradley House was the principal residence. He also represented Devon, Totnes, and Exeter. He was twice Speaker of the House of Commons in the Cavalier Parliament, the first non-lawyer chosen for that place for a considerable time, and his tenure is dated from 1673.

In 1679 he was the only nominee for Speaker who was refused royal approbation, and Parliament was prorogued. He was a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty from 1673 to 1679, then a privy counsellor, Treasurer of the Navy from 1673 to 1681, a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury from 15 November 1690 to 2 May 1696, and Comptroller of the Household from 1702 to 1704. He was responsible for the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. In 1667 he signed the declarations of the company of Royal Adventurers trading into Africa, the step that led to the expansion of the Royal Africa Company.

He opposed the Exclusion Bill. In the Glorious Revolution he was one of the first Tories to declare for the Prince of Orange. The exchange recorded from their first meeting has the prince say that Seymour was of the family of the Duke of Somerset, and Seymour answer that the Duke of Somerset was of his family. He died at Bradley House.

There is no document that says he stripped this castle, but it is judged likely that he took useful materials to fund the rebuilding of Bradley House, which he finished in 1710. Another account is direct. In 1697 Prince wrote that the castle was now demolished and buried in its own ruins, with nothing standing but a few broken walls. That demolition is attributed to this new owner.

Timbers were taken out whole, flagstones lifted, lead and tiles stripped from the roofs, glass torn from the windows and the leading melted down, and decorated stonework removed. The castle was in use until 1694, and it is supposed to have been demolished after Lady Anne’s death. Prince’s printed book, written in 1697 and published at Exeter in 1701, says the apartments within were very splendid, especially the dining room, adorned besides paint with statues and figures cut in alabaster, and that all this glory now lay in the dust. A later manuscript volume, completed in 1716, contains his biography of Sir Edward Seymour IV and adds to the picture of the later seventeenth century.

One account names the 1701 author as John Price. Partial demolition is placed about 1697. The ruin is also placed in 1701, by about 1700, and by the early eighteenth century. Excavation found no sign that the castle was bombarded by cannon from the hillside opposite during the English Civil War, and no sign of a great fire after a lightning strike.

Both of those were common explanations of the destruction. What the digging did show was that the buildings were systematically stripped of reusable materials shortly after demolition. Between the partial demolition of about 1697 and the Buck engraving of 1734, which shows a tree-grown ruin, the history is thin. In 1720 Sir Edward Seymour VI leased out the manor house of Berry Pomeroy and reserved, for himself or his steward, rooms whose names correspond closely with rooms in the 1688 inventory, all of them in the Elizabethan mansion.

It is uncertain whether usable rooms still survived in the castle, or whether the reserved rooms were in the manor house beside the church.

The Seymour baronets, settled at Maiden Bradley, succeeded at last to the title of Duke of Somerset in 1750. With the picturesque taste of the late eighteenth century the ruin, then the haunt of jackdaws and overgrown with ivy, was treated as a romantic sight. Artists came, and the castle became a popular destination. Illustrations filled books of that kind.

A catalogue of Devon topographical prints lists forty-five prints of the castle, from the earliest by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, published in London in 1734, to one published in Exeter in 1861. From the 1790s there were many sketches, watercolours and engravings of the ivy-covered ruins. Thomas Rowlandson painted distant views from the Gatcombe valley about 1818. William Gauci, after C.

F. Williams, made a set of six lithographs of exteriors and interiors about 1840, including the lower arch and the first-floor doorway that once led from the great staircase into the Jacobean north wing. Around 1830 the Duke of Somerset repaired some of the crumbling walls, an early example of conservation on a ruined building, probably from concern for the safety of visitors. The growth of Torquay, and later of Paignton, as holiday resorts brought more people to the ruins and to stories of a sinister past.

The legends are told as legends. The castle is reputed to be one of the most haunted in Britain, and it is promoted as the most haunted castle in Devon. Two female ghosts are named. The Blue Lady is said to beckon for help and to lure people to her tower, where they fall to their death.

She is thought to have been the daughter of a Norman lord, wandering the dungeons and mourning a baby she had murdered because it was fathered by her own father. The White Lady is said to be Margaret Pomeroy, imprisoned in the dungeons by her sister Eleanor out of jealousy of her beauty. The two stories often blur. A wishing tree, a beech, had the custom of a wish whispered against the trunk and a walk backwards around it several times, and also a walk backwards three times.

A survey placed that tree at SX 8400 6232, called its great age a probable exaggeration, and in the early 1950s found it scarred by fire and largely decayed. Edward Montague, a pseudonym whose true identity is not known, published the novel The Castle of Berry Pomeroy in 1806, a story of mystery, love and jealousy. Only two copies of the first edition were known. Elizabeth Goudge used the castle as the fictional setting of The Castle on the Hill.

The novel is dated 1942, and also 1941. It is set in late 1940, at the start of the Blitz after the Battle of Britain, and it imagines the house still occupied by descendants of the family who built it after the Norman Conquest, with a German bomber jettisoning its bombs and largely destroying the castle. Elizabeth Goudge, Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge, was born on 24 April 1900 at Wells and died on 1 April 1984 at Rotherfield Peppard. After her father’s death in 1939 she and her mother moved to Marldon in Devon, to a bungalow in Westerland Lane later called Providence Cottage, and they lived there for twelve years.

She set several books in Marldon, and the list of those books includes The Castle on the Hill. She won the Carnegie Medal in 1946 for The Little White Horse, and the same honour is also dated 1945. The castle later appeared in the documentary White Slaves and Pirate Gold, in the programme Most Haunted, and as a location in Five Go Mad in Dorset, first shown on 2 November 1982.

The ruin is a Grade I listed building, first listed on 9 February 1961, and a scheduled monument, first scheduled on 13 January 1915, with the scheduling amended on 10 February 1993. A preservation order and a guardianship order have been in force from 13 September 1977. It is still owned by John Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset, a direct descendant of the Berry Pomeroy Seymours, and it is administered for him. John Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset, John Michael Edward Seymour, was born on 30 December 1952 and styled Lord Seymour between 1954 and 1984.

He qualified as a chartered surveyor and succeeded his father, Percy Seymour, 18th Duke of Somerset, in 1984. He lost his seat in the House of Lords under the Act of 1999 and was elected again, as a crossbencher, in the December 2014 by-election. He was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Wiltshire in 1993 and for Devon in 2003. On 20 May 1978 he married Judith-Rose Hull.

Their children include Sebastian Edward Seymour, Lord Seymour, born on 3 February 1982, Lady Sophia Rose Seymour, born in March 1987, Lady Henrietta Charlotte Seymour, born in 1989, and Lord Charles Thomas George Seymour, born in 1992. His principal seat is Bradley House at Maiden Bradley, and he also owns this castle. In 2015 he was involved in a dispute over a plan to build housing on ancestral land he owns in Totnes, which is not described as this castle. Map references for the monument include SX 83897 62213 and SX 83912 62308, SX 83903 62297, SX 83905 62298, and SX 83900 62323, with a survey centre written SX 8390 6229.

The point is also given as latitude 50.449 and longitude 3.63662 west, and as 50.449226 and 3.636628 west, matching 50 degrees 26 minutes 56 seconds north and 3 degrees 38 minutes 12 seconds west.

Between 1980 and 1996 about half the surface was excavated, the later years under Stewart Brown. The work, with surveys of the standing structure, reports on the finds, the wall painting, the gunports, the tree rings, and a documentary history by Jean Manco, was published in 1996, in a volume dated 1996 for 1998. That volume is given as pages 1 to 201 and also as pages 1 to 335. The digging overturned the Norman origin and the idea that the Protector built the mansion.

Only five sherds of late medieval pottery were found, and the conclusion was that nothing more substantial than a hunting lodge or a park-keeper’s house stood here before the late fifteenth-century castle. In 1980 an area immediately outside the great hall produced a stone colonnade running parallel to the hall, neo-classical, extensively robbed before it collapsed, suggested as late sixteenth-century and as standing for about a hundred years. Very early small-bowled tobacco pipes of about 1580 to 1610 show that the Seymour household took up smoking quickly. Chinese porcelain and other imported pottery were found with them.

A fragment of early seventeenth-century decorative plaster, in the shape of a horse’s head, came from the area of the north-wing kitchen. The excavated post-medieval pottery was predominantly Totnes-type ware, a class exported to Newfoundland and not widely circulated elsewhere in Devon. Ceramic skillets with conical bodies occur in a context of about 1570 to 1650. Portuguese faience was found.

The site archive and most of the finds from 1980 to 1996 are held at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

A watching brief between July and November 1996, during landscaping of the east terrace, found make-up and infill dumped on the steep slope immediately east of the castle while the terrace and its revetment were built. The terrace and two stone walls were begun about 1590 to 1610, carried about halfway along the intended line from the north-west end, and abandoned sometime about 1610 to 1620. Recording of the gatehouse before roof repairs and rainwater drains found an earth bank and a filled ditch to the west, with six fragments of late medieval or early post-medieval ridge tile and two pottery sherds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A kitchen fireplace in the north range, of about 1600, preserves a developed boiling furnace, in which the flames were taken off by a flue at the back of the pot rather than flaring out of the top.

An exceptionally large and early smoking chamber survives almost intact in the south range, inserted about 1610 to 1630 by converting an earlier first-floor wall cupboard. There is no access to it from the ground-floor service rooms. Meat would have hung in the tall chamber with the lower door closed, while a square shutter in the kitchen below, probably a stone slab, was slid open over a smoke duct in the chimney corner, above a pastry oven. Smoke from wood, chips or sawdust was drawn up and left by a small window in the outer wall.

In 2006, work for a new admissions building exposed part of an outer bank of the late fifteenth-century defensive ditch, and remains of a retaining wall that once flanked the carriage drive. A wide dump of redeposited slate and clay was read as the levelling of the defences in the sixteenth or seventeenth century and the making of a courtyard outside the gatehouse. Above that dump were many fragments of broken ashlar and other stone robbed from the castle after its abandonment about 1700. The stone appears to have been redressed outside the gatehouse before it was carried away.

In 2007, during a condition survey, parts of the foundations of the north range, of about 1600, were uncovered, with demolition deposits from after the abandonment of about 1700. Limited work on the standing structure found no previously unseen features. That record is placed at grid 283908, 62327. Consent for masonry repairs to the north range was granted in 2014.

In 2021 consent was granted, on conditions, for CCTV cameras at an agreed place and for a discreet anti-climb grille on the gatehouse, after repeated trespass and vandalism.

On a Sunday reported on 31 January 2024, Devon and Cornwall Police said that about ten patches of grass had been dug at the castle in a nighthawking incident, and that about six people had come with a metal detector to remove historical items. Artefacts may have been taken. Staff arriving on the Sunday morning found a large number of holes and scattered rubbish. Win Scutt, a senior properties curator, said that damage from unskilled digging on a site of this importance is irreversible, and that it will never be known how much knowledge of the buried archaeology was lost.

Mark Harrison, head of heritage crime, said that the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 protects the castle, and that a person found guilty can receive a substantial fine, a term of imprisonment, or both. Photographs of the gatehouse and the Elizabethan house were taken in 2024, and the county record was updated on 7 August 2024. Those photographs are not a new excavation. The questions that remain are the exact year between 1461 and 1496, the designer of the gunports, the designer of the Elizabethan house and of the Jacobean wing, and whether any rooms of the mansion were still usable in 1720.