History
Originally built as a priory with adjoining St Germans Priory Church parts of the house date back to the twelfth century. It was substantially altered and remodelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by noted architects including Sir John Soane.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Eliot family invested heavily in the estate, building numerous farmhouses, fisherman's cottages and other dwellings across the land. Many of these remain part of the estate to this day and are rented out to local residents and friends of the family. Some properties, mainly lying remote from the estate, have been sold in recent years.
Read more about this topic: Port Eliot
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)