A National Trust site a little over an hour's drive from Bristol has unveiled concept plans that include ziplines, better restaurant facilities, new car parking and a play area. Lewis Paterson from Knightshayes, on the outskirts of Tiverton, recently spoke about the future of the National Trust property, saying that plans to improve the site were being discussed.
He said: “What you see now was built for around 75,000 visitors. Originally the café and reception were in the house, but they got too busy and retreated to the Stables.
"We got lucky as we had a storm once and could make the car park a bit bigger, but it’s not really fit for purpose and doesn’t join together. One of the things we looked at in 2019 was a spatial plan to make Knightshayes work better for us.
"We know where our main pressure areas are, and the worst for us is our car park and stables.”
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Devon Live reports that the Stables is home to both the reception and café, as well as the venue's retail shop. Mr Paterson added that during the pandemic visitor numbers had decreased, meaning the flow of people had worked but it was still a "horrible experience".
He went on to say: "When you come in, you drive up through the parkland and get a glimpse of a house, stables in front of you and kitchen garden to the left - it’s a magical experience. Then you enter the car park, and it starts going slightly wrong.
"You get jumbled up when you get out of your car and get mud on your feet. Then you must find your way to reception through the Stables back entrance and head through the shop. We have a word for it - it’s confused in a beautiful environment.”
Mr Paterson added that the team at Knightshayes were looking to address this issue by moving their retail shop and reception away from the Stables and into a more central location. He said: "We’re looking to put the new reception in the current volunteers’ car park area, close to a tennis court and by the basic building we already have.
"It will allow us to put our new facilities in quite a central location, next to the biggest, flattest, squarest bit of the car park, to draw the people in. By moving the entrance to the garden, which is the most significant thing, you can bring people straight into a less sensitive area, Holly’s Wood, and we think this is a better way to reveal it to our visitors.
"We don’t want people to come in via the back of the stables and want them to come down the path and into the front to get the magical Burgess intended view of everything. Therefore, this will leave a brownfield site in the middle of Knightshayes, and one thought is to put clay into it, which is good for young and older children.
"It works well for zip lines, and there have been trees and bits of pieces where you could get a good, scary experience. It will be around a £150,000 investment and be accessed at the back of the Stables as a family area and be a good safe area.”
He also spoke about the café expansion, saying: "If we move the retail and reception from the Stables, it becomes a much nicer café and not one where you’re crammed into a little seating area. Giving that space allows the building to talk for itself.
"When you don’t have 200 people there like sardines, you can start to see the hard granite slabs on the floor where the carriages went in, and you can start to see the machinery where the current shop is at the moment. We don’t look to cram as many people in - we look to let the buildings talk for themselves.”
In addition to all this, Mr Paterson added that the team at Knightshayes were also looking to enhance the Kitchen Garden and its surrounding area. He said: "The area around the Kitchen Garden is about looking to bring standards back in there, and start reopening things like the middle and top terraces, and investigate where we can put visitor facilities in which will cater for a slightly different audience.
“One of the things we look at in the Kitchen Garden is using our productive garden, taking that produce, and putting it in a restaurant which looks out over that without damaging the character of that area to sustain and support the garden. We also have a sawmill we want to stabilise and re-roof, and our thinking is that it could become a community use area for the Brownies or Cub Scouts to work from when they visit us. We have thought of everything we hope.”
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