St Olave’s Church, Exeter (mostly 14th century)
In June 1868 the Rev. John Ingle (1823-1901) purchased 2 adjoining parcels of land in Murchington, a hamlet lying on the edge of the sprawling Dartmoor parish of Throwleigh, at a cost of £1900. Together these parcels, being ‘Dickers Tenement’ and ‘Dodds Farm,’ represented some 50 acres of woodland, coppice and valuable water meadows, together with a range of farm buildings and cottages. He renamed the property ‘St Olaves’ after his own medieval parish church on Fore Street, Exeter.
The granite retaining walls at St Olaves
John Ingle spent considerable sums on hard landscaping and the laying out of formal gardens, fruit gardens, and a croquet lawn, all of which are still in evidence today. Ingle pulled down many of the labourers’ cottages on his land, including the properties styled as ‘Waste Houses Court’ on the 1840 tithe map. These commanded a magnificent view over the Teign valley and Holy Street Wood, and there is evidence that Ingle originally planned to build a grand residence here. But in the end the levelled site became a croquet lawn and Ingle contented himslef with adapting the finest of the cottages he had acquired into a single residence. Some of the stone needed to build the new garden’s massive granite retaining walls came from the site, but much would have needed to be brought in. These walls can still be seen clearly etched into the hillside when viewed from Meldon Hill on the other side of the Teign valley. It is likely that many of the specimen trees dotted around the property and the adjacent Milfordleigh Planation (now National Trust) date from this time, including the massive Redwoods and the Grand and Douglas Firs. It is noteworthy, for instance, that a group of these large specimen trees was planted on a strip of land acquired by Ingle in 1873.
However, by 1873 Ingle was beginning to overreach himself financially by 1873. Through the 1870s he took out a series of mortgages against the property, and in both 1880 and 1881 he attempted to sell St Olaves and all its contents at auction, presumably to liquidate his by now substantial debts.
On 1882 Ingle’s debtors forced him to sign away the whole of his income from his Exeter parish ‘living’ in lieu of unpaid mortgage interest, and in 1883 he was finally obliged to relinquish control of the core of the St Olaves estate (the house, grounds and 22 acres) to his principal creditor, the Rev. William T.A. Radford of Down St Mary.
Ingle died almost penniless at Exeter in 1901. In his will he declared: ‘I charge all my children not to bear the least animosity to William Tucker Arundel Radford BA rector of Down Saint Mary. In taking possession of my beloved home and grounds at Murchington he did only that which he was justly entitled to do.’
Scot’s Pine, 2019
This tree stood on the land added to St Olaves by Ingle in 1873, till it was brought down by Storm Ciara in February 2020.