Historic home Forde Abbey boasts 'the best room in Dorset'

Medieval Forde Abbey was founded in the 12th century by Cistercian monks.

Its 30 acres of grounds form part of the Forde Abbey complex near Thorncombe, which includes a fruit farm, tree nursery and 2,000 acres of farm land.

In the 2024 edition of the Dorset Year Book, Andrew Headley celebrates the abbey, which boasts a talking point jet d’eau, which sends a single plume of white wate 160 feet (nearly 50 metres) into the air. It’s the highest powered fountain in the country.

It was created in 2005 to mark the centenary of the Roper family coming to Forde Abbey.

Forde Abbey (Image: NQ)

The abbey was founded initially at Brightley, Devon, as a Cistercian house from Waverley, Surrey in 1136. It was transferred to Forde in 1141.

At the Dissolution, when the establishment had declined to the abbot and just 12 monks, the abbey was granted to Sir Richard Pollard (son of the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.) Following the 1539 Dissolution, for more than a century before the arrival of the Prideaux family, Forde Abbey had mouldered away under various absentee owners. As a Cistercian monastery for 400 years it had become one of the wealthiest religious houses in the country, so was a prime target for Henry VIII’s grab.

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Last in the long line of Abbots was Thomas Chard, who remodelled the house between 1521 and 1539, including the creation of the Great Hall and the porch with its magnificent two-storey oriel window.

The Great Hall (Image: Supplied) The Great Hall is noted for its wonderful painted ceiling. Two relics of the Abbey church – which was destroyed at the time of the Dissolution – remain.

There is a statue of St Catherine, who has lost her head but can be identified by the wheel she is holding, and one of St Margaret, who was the daughter of an exiled Anglo-Saxon prince and ended up marrying the King of Scotland.

Edmund Prideaux, MP for Lyme Regis, took over a rather dilapidated Forde Abbey in 1649. He made major improvements, including the creation of the Saloon and the Grand Staircase. He was committed to the Parliamentarian cause, ending up as Attorney General to Oliver Cromwell. His son, also Edmund, took a financial blow as a result of entertaining the Duke of Monmouth to dinner, once, in 1680.

Five years later, after Monmouth’s abortive attempt to oust his uncle, Jamess II, Judge Jeffries took that dinner to mean that Prideaux must have been a supporter of the rebellion and had him locked up in the Tower of London.

It cost Prideaux £15,000 (equivalent to £2.5m today) to escape the gallows.

The Saloon (Image: Supplied) Prideaux’s Grand Staircase leads up to the first floor, where the main room is the Saloon. It was described by a previous occupant of the house with pride as ‘the best room in Dorset’.

For more information on the Dorset Year Book, see the Dorset Society of Men website here

The Prideaux coat of arms forms the centre of the impressive plaster ceiling and is surrounded by biblical scenes. On the walls are the Mortlake Tapestries, woven from cartoons by Raphael which were created by him as originals for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

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Other notable rooms are the Upper Refectory, with a 21ft long oak table and a replica of a servant’s room from the early 18th century.

The Cloisters (Image: Supplied) On the ground floor the Cloisters are all that remains of what would have been a rectangle, with the Abbey church forming one side.

Just outside the house is the Chapel, created by Prideaux from the Chapter House, where the monks would have attended to the Abbey’s substantial business interests. It has plain but pleasing 12th century vaulting.

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Forde Abbey’s gardens, covering 30 acres in all, were largely created by Francis Gwyn and his wife Margaret (nee Prideaux) but successive Gwyns and Ropers cherished and developed them.

There is a Winter Garden and a Spiral Garden, inspired by the penitential spiral used by monks for meditation. Statues are dotted throughout – including a charming figure of Alice in Wonderlandin the Kitchen Garden.

Information also taken from The Buildings of England - Dorset by Michael Hill, John Newman and Nikolaus Pevsner.