Jane and Mary Parminter

[1] Jane Parminter was born on 5 February 1750 in Lisbon, Portugal, where her father, a Devon wine merchant, was based.

[8] Inspired by the chapel of San Vitale in Ravenna, which they had visited on their tour, Jane and Mary had the sixteen-sided A la Ronde built just outside Exmouth in Devon.

[12] In the summer of 1811, the cousins also drew up plans for a small chapel, Point in View, built next to the house, along with almshouses and a school.

[3][2] The Parminter's work at A la Ronde was featured in an exhibition, Radical Rooms, organised by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2022.

The exhibition examined the role of British women in architecture, focusing on Bess of Hardwick, Patty Hopkins and the Parminters.

[2] An apocryphal story popular among Christian Zionists in the 1800s was that Jane Parminter attached a codicil to her will that the oak trees at A la Ronde "shall remain standing and the hand of man shall not be lifted up against them till Israel returns and is restored to the land of promise."

This codicil then inspired Lewis Way to fund and re-invigorate the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews; Franz Delitzsch would write a pamphlet in 1877 on the Parminters called "The Oaks of A la Ronde".

Jane Parminter died in 1811 and was buried in a vault beneath the Point in View chapel that the cousins had built on the site.