Prince Hall Country House Hotel & Restaurant, Princetown

Grade-II listed 28/10/1987, exterior listed. List Entry No 132 6396, Legacy System No 92752. Small country house used as hotel. Circa 1780-90. Plastered stone walls. Slate roof with overhanging sprocketted eaves, hipped to left end and gabled to wing. 3 rendered stacks, one at left-hand end, one axial to main range and one at right-hand end of wing. Plan: Main range with cross-wing at right-hand end. Main range has entrance hall running longitudinally along the entrance front with a small room at its right end. Behind the hall, facing the garden, are two principal rooms. The cross wing to the left has a further principal room facing the garden and service rooms at the rear. The staircase is at the front of the entrance hall. Exterior: 2 storeys with attic. Asymmetrical 4:2 window garden front with slightly projecting wing to right. 12-pane hornless sashes, some of which may be original; to the ground floor of the main range are C20 4-pane sashes. Round-headed window on 2nd floor of wing. Rear entrance front has wing projecting to the left with original tall round-headed stair window. C20 porch at centre of main range with probably original double 6-panelled doors. Inside door to house has fanlight above. Interior: 2 of the principal rooms have marble chimneypieces with tapering octagonal columns, that in the left-hand end room has its original grate with square opening. This room has a decorative cornice and ceiling band. The central room has a plain moulded band and cornice. The original staircase survives - open string with turned balusters and turned and moulded newels with finials. Other original joinery such as 6-panelled doors and panelled shutters survive. Outside, at the left-hand end of the-house on the entrance side, is a rectangular cobbled courtyard bounded on 3 sides by a tall crenellated wall, opposite to the house is a former coach house, now roofless. Prince Hall is one of the 17 Ancient Tenements of the Forest of Dartmoor first mentioned in documents in 1521. In 1780 a Mr Gullet bought the site and began improvements to the buildings which were completed by Francis Buller a distinguished lawyer and judge when he bought the property in the late 1780s. A print of 1797 depicts the house in a similar form to that in which it survives. Source : W Crossing - "A Hundred Years on Dartmoor" ; Dartmoor : A New study - Enclosure and the Improvers - J S Cocks.