Pope's villa
The only decoration to the facade consisted of a pedimented window at the centre of the principal floor, and a stone urn at each termination of the closed parapet.
The arch, flanked by small Florentine Renaissance style windows, is redolent of a water entrance to the portico of a Venetian palazzo.
The arch, or portal, was contained in a ground projection of the corps de logis which formed the base for the modest portico, more a porch; asked by Pope for his opinion of this renovation, Lord Burlington wrote that "my friend Kent has done all that can be, considering the place".
Beginning with Pope's own verse and continuing after his death, "[The house] rapidly ... established itself as the seat of the Muses, and his garden as a model of landscape design.
In 1725 Pope wrote to his friend Edward Blount of Blagdon, Paignton in Devon: I have put the last hand to my works ... happily finishing the subterraneous Way and Grotto: I then found a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual Rill, that echoes thru' the Cavern day and night.
...When you shut the Doors of this Grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture ... And when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular Forms ... at which when a Lamp ...is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed Rays glitter and are reflected over the place.
For four years he redecorated it with marble, alabaster, colourful ores such as mundic and snakestones, stalactites, crystals, and diamonds from Bristol and Cornwall, much of it supplied by William Borlase, a Cornish geologist.
He also received a stalagmite from Wookey Hole, giving rise to a false rumour which has persisted into the 21st century that he hired locals to shoot stalactites from the roof of the Witches' Cavern.
[16] It now consists of a loggia and a central room with north and south "chapels" branching from it; little survives of the rustic arcades and columns and other decoration from Pope's time, and the existing religious decorations—a carved stone in the ceiling of the loggia representing the Crown of Thorns, a shield with the Five Wounds of Christ above the arch leading to the main room and statues of the Virgin Mary and of St James of Compostella in the two "chapels"—are all believed to be 19th-century.
Thomas Young, a tea merchant, came into possession of the property in 1842 and had a 'Tudor Gothic' house built on the site of Pope's villa, designed by Henry Edward Kendall Jr.
