"This historic building has provided hospitality for kings, queens, princes, princesses and numerous lords and ladies since the reign of Elizabeth I.
The house faces south overlooking an expanse of lawns. Part of the few acres that have been retained from the large estate in which it once stood.
Forde House is named after a ford in the Aller Brook which carried the road to Shaldon, St Marychurch and Aller, and lies within the ancient parish of Wolborough. Prior to the dissolution of the monasteries, Wolborough belonged to Torre Abbey and it is probable that Forde had been one of the Abbey's large granges which paid it tithes on its produce.
John Gaverock had been the Abbot's steward and for his services had received an annual salary of £3.00. Torre Abbey was dissolved in 1539, during the reign of Henry VIII, and soon after, in 1545, the King sold the manor of Wolborough to Gaverock and his wife for the sum of £592 14s 2d. When Gaverock became lord of the manor he set about building himself a new manorial home at Forde. The origin of the older building at the rear of the present Forde House is obscure, but it is probable that it is the house erected by John Gaverock after he acquired the manor in 1545.
John Gaverock's three daughters inherited Forde House and, towards the close of the sixteenth century, sold it to Richard Reynell of the Middle Temple, an eminent lawyer and officer in the Court of the Exchequer, a son of Richard Reynell, the lord of the adjoining manor of East Ogwell. He married Lucy Brandon whose father was sometime Chamberlain of the City of London. Soon after Richard and Lucy Reynell had acquired the manor they set about building themselves a fine new house at Forde.
The present house bears the date 1610 and is built in the shape of the letter E, commonly thought to be in honour of Queen Elizabeth 1, who had just died. It is, architecturally, a plain, substantial structure built of roughcasted stone in the Elizabethan style. The grounds once included a deer park which was later to disappear beneath the inroads of the railway; the area of Newton Abbot now known as Decoy did in fact include a decoy for trapping wildfowl.
