The House
As the Gateway to the West Country, Somerset is a land steeped in myths and legends. Lively with agriculture, this vibrant county offers residents and explorers a thriving slice of English culture and countryside; you’ll find everything here from historic cities, towering cathedrals, and ancient castles to contemporary art, stargazing, and fine cider.
The Family ‘Buick’ – a very unusual sight in these parts. Information about this vehicle would be appreciated.
The History of Bossington Hall
A House Built for a View
Allan Hughes had been looking at this hillside for years. Renting a house at Chapel Knap in Porlock Weir for stag hunting, he would look across to an orchard lying under the woods opposite and say: “That is the place to build a house; there is always a patch of sunlight there.”
Eventually he bought the land — some forty acres — from the Clarke family (the decendents still live next door in the same house they have for 500 years), commissioned the architect C.H.B. Quennell to draw up plans, (copies of the originals line the long rear corridor today) and engaged John Cooksley, a local builder, to construct the house. Work began in September 1911. The result was Lynch House: a substantial Arts and Crafts country house in the Lutyens manner, built from local stone, set into the hillside with long views across Porlock Vale and the Bristol Channel beyond.
Quennell is perhaps better known today for the many-volumed History of Everyday Things he wrote with his wife Mary — a standard reference in school libraries for decades. We have a few copies of this book int he library. The house he designed here is quietly extraordinary.
1911 — The Building of Lynch House
Allan Hughes was one of the last great independently minded Victorian ship owners. He established the Federal Steam Navigation Company, took over the New Zealand Shipping Company, and built both into dominant forces in the meat trade with Australia and New Zealand — among the first to introduce refrigeration into ships’ holds. His companies were eventually absorbed by P&O, of which he became a director; he remained chairman of the New Zealand Shipping Company at the age of seventy-six.
The house he built reflects the same thoroughness. An original ledger — Daily Account of Labour and Materials at Lynch Mills, running from Monday 19th September 1911 to Friday 1st August 1913 — is still held in the house. It records in meticulous detail the materials brought in from across the region: stone from Hawkcombe, slates from Treborough, millstones from Porlock, gothic latches, archangel red bricks from Alcombe, bullnose blue bricks, Norfolk latches, Ham Hill freestone, alabaster rock from Blue Anchor, Bristol tiles, Dutch tiles, old beams from Luccombe, and three hundredweight of hair for plaster. A single day’s labour account lists nineteen men at work: eight masons, five carpenters, a painter, a plumber, a thatcher, a man with a horse, two boys — and four more horses.
The ship’s insulation from Hughes’ refrigerated vessels can still be found lining the floors of the house today.
Entrance driveway, presumed during contruction
1923 — The Nursery Wing and the Squash Court
By 1923 the estate was expanding. A nursery wing was added, bringing the total to twenty-eight bedrooms (including servants’ quarters), six bathrooms and a dairy. A bowling green, tennis court and squash court were built in the grounds — the squash court believed to be the oldest private squash court in the United Kingdom, and still in use by guests today.
At its peak the estate employed the majority of working Allerford — hardly a family in the village did not have someone working at Lynch Country House. Six gardeners maintained the eight acres of grounds, planned and laid out by Hughes’ wife Googie; one was responsible solely for supplying fresh flowers to the house daily. There were three grooms, a chauffeur who drove Googie out each day in a pre-war Buick, and seven indoor maids.
Mr. Hughes had firm views on domestic staff: men, he said, were dirty, stole your silk handkerchiefs and drank your port.
One local woman recalls leaving school at fourteen to work at Lynch Country House, where she was treated like a daughter. Another remembers visiting as a child from Selworthy and sitting in the big room making hassocks for the church.
The gardens were not formal, but extensive — a fine rose garden, glasshouses, a water garden and shrubbery. Benefiting from a sheltered micro-climate, the grounds feature palms, Canna, Crinodendron, Clerodendrum and Ginkgo biloba among the planting. In spring, the orchard near the entrance and the bank along the drive produce a carpet of daffodils; one local woman remembers picking them as a girl, bunching them to send to Covent Garden.
1934 — The National Trust and the Post-War Years
After the First World War, Hughes purchased a thousand acres of moorland on Dunkery to preserve the hunting. In 1934, this land was given to the National Trust by his wife, with a covenant preventing the Trust from banning hunting. Hughes and others also acquired the Deer Park near Oare from Sir Edward Mountain of Eagle Star Insurance, forming the Badgworthy Land Company to preserve the land for hunting in perpetuity.
At the heart of the house is the Grand Hall — the family sitting room, capable of entertaining two hundred guests, once home to two fireplaces including one with an Italian marble surround. Fine oak features throughout, much of it salvaged ship’s timber. The attic is vast and cedar-lined, with wardrobes built to house fur coats. The cellars contain original water filters, sluices, a slate dairy and 1000 bottle wine racking.
The last family member of the four generations who lived at Lynch Country House captured it well: “It is grand but not at all pretentious. Although the house was only built recently, its manners are perfect, and its grey stone fits in so well with the surroundings — it almost looks as if it has always been there.”
1982 — Sale and Conversion
In 1982 the house was sold at auction. By Easter 1983, the new owners had converted it into seven self-catering holiday apartments, retaining the fine leaded windows in their oak frames, the oak doors and the original cupboards. The house had its own reservoir in Lynch Combe — still visible today — though mains water and sewerage were installed at this point. Water from the reservoir continues to supply the rose garden.
The land surrounding the Hall is part of the Holnicote Estate (pronounced honey-cut), once belonging to the Acland family, who gave it to the National Trust in 1940. The great benefit of this is that no unsympathetic development has occurred locally, and the villages remain as quiet and unchanged as they have been for centuries.
1998–2016 — Return to a Single House
In 1998 the property passed to a German family, existing guests who had fallen in love with the house. They maintained it as holiday apartments for a further eighteen years.
In 2016, the house was purchased by the current owner. Renamed Bossington Hall — in part to distinguish it from another Lynch Country House in nearby Somerton — it was restored as a single country house for the first time in decades. The corridors divided during the apartment conversion were reopened, a modern heating system installed, and the house brought carefully back to the grace and character of its Edwardian origins. In 2021, following the pandemic, it reopened as Bossington Hall Luxury B&B in Porlock : the incarnation it remains today.
