Do we choose our homes or do they choose us? At Dockacre, a Grade II-listed house in the Cornish town of Launceston, one must be at ease with asking who is in charge, and from what era they come. Dockacre’s reputation as documented by sources as various as the Victorian antiquarian Sabine Baring-Gould, local-history societies and the inevitable paranormal-activity associations I would have it that absolute authority is not located in the here and now but in the property’s past.
Spoken of as ‘Darkacre’ in local taverns and mentioned in numerous books of a ghostly nature, Dockacre (or ‘Dokkeaker’ as it was formerly known) was built as a small farmhouse around 1520 with an extension added in 1590, creating an Elizabethan long-house. Two portraits of the house’s most famous owners, the Herles, have passed down the line of ownership and remain in the house, together with a bag of reputedly haunted walking sticks. A compassionate reading of their story is recorded in a booklet from the 1980s written by Raymond Buckeridge, the previous owner’s father. While local legend suggests that Elizabeth Herle was starved to death, Buckeridge suggests she was more likely to have died as the result of an eating disorder. Following his publication of the house’s history, peace returned to the home despite a darkness long falsely rumoured. The pictures of the Herles hang in the dining room.
The very night after the current custodian, Simon Costin, director of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, visited Dockacre for the first time (it was then on the market), he had a dream in which he decorated the house extravagantly for Yuletide. Recounting the precise details to the vendor a few days later, it became clear that his dream had striking similarities with the earlier arrangement of the house. Simon had conjured an exact imitation of Dockacre’s interior when the seller’s parents had lived there, she informed him, down to a grandfather clock and an ormolu mirror. The photo albums the vendor shared shortly afterwards confirmed this; one might surmise that the house chose Simon, not the other way around. So began a complex acquisition process in the midst of lockdown.
Since securing the place in 2020, Simon has commissioned a garden redesign by Jonny Bruce, who restored the exterior plantings at Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness (Wol June 2019); specifications from conservation architect David Scott; and restoration work from a team led by Ann Bloor, whose sensitivity and experience in maintaining elderly buildings the new owner has come to rely on. This extraordinary team remains actively involved in the house’s preservation – indeed, at the time of writing, Bloor is personally repainting the entire exterior.
The present décor was dreamed up by Simon, whose career as an art director equipped him with the hand and eye to propel Dockacre from a moored-in-the-nineties take on a heritage townhouse to its current state. The result is a singularly intuitive reinterpretation, which gives glimpses of a past long obscured. A covering of arsenic green, for example, was revealed after months spent scraping cream paint off the palimpsest that is the living-room walls, while the bed in the main chamber is a masterpiece of carved reliefs repurposed from dilapidated armoires rescued from a bonfire in the south of France. Expertly reclaimed by Bill Bradley of design/joinery firm Ecoism, it seems to float towards an enchanted territory summoned entirely from Simon’s imagination.
Similar beguilements await in the dining room, where a table has been decorated with fantastic beasts by Jude Wisdom, and the bathroom with its roguish gallery of masks. All is characterised by a bravura mastery of colour, shade and texture; the bright hues in the bedroom are strikingly faithful invocations of Tudor bedchambers. In the Elizabethan half-acre outside, other beings roam; two cast figures of hinds by the front door raise a hoof in salute to their lord, the great god Pan, while a monument to Penda, one of the last pagan monarchs in England, emerges from the earth nearby. These recent embellishments somehow seem as though they’ve always been there.
The Cornish language was widely spoken when Dockacre was first constructed, and it would have been the main tongue of those who laid the first stones and raised the first timbers. English was not used extensively across the county for another 100 years. Royal dynasties have come and gone since then. Revolutions have surged and republics risen and fallen. Dockacre has seen the birth of new churches and the suppression and renascence of old ones. In 1557, during the persecutions by Queen Mary, a Protestant martyr from Launceston was burned at the stake in Exeter, while in 1557, under Elizabeth I, a Catholic priest was executed in the town’s market square. Shackles from the castle now reside in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. A secret passageway may once have existed between the house and the castle, but the route’s entrance has long been blocked. The Medieval fortification’s so-called witches’ tower, where, legend has it, the accused women met their fate, fell in 1830. Dockacre itself has seen its boundaries changed, and some of its territories disappear.
The house has tilted remarkably with passing time, its patina has deepened, its silhouette long changed from thatch to slate, the undulations of its former roofline reflected in the mullions, which lean outwards to the garden like the sterns of galleons. It has risen and stands improbably without foundations – just a few degrees shy of foursquare to the compass quirkily, firmly on Mother Earth. One of its gables contains the remains of a tree. An ancient yew shades the southeasterly front. And a timeworn mulberry, several hundred years old, reclines against the garden wall. Dockacre has accommodated a school for young ladies, an admiral, a county sheriff and a mayor, been written into stories and scored into the polyphony of local history. Following the retelling of the Herles’ story, and despite popular myth that propagates the grislier details, a rapprochement has arrived.
The house is still alive with eerie tales: kindly shadows open doors for shut-out dogs; paintings are removed from the wall to rest on the floor, like the start of a conversation about their hanging. Witch balls are carefully taken down and placed dead-centre on the hallway table – leaded casement windows have framed many such mischiefs past and present. Today the residents, like their predecessors, look out on the spring and summer gardens; the sum of half a thousand autumns, winters and the coming of another time.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 2024 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
