It is a misty day at Combe Sydenham, the Elizabethan mansion on Exmoor where Elizabeth Sydenham, the second wife of Sir Frances Drake, grew up. At a time when many stately homes are restored, their gardens manicured and their entrances waymarked, Combe Sydenham remains refreshingly tumbledown and mysterious, a sandstone house and outbuildings nestling at the bottom of the wooded valley.Arched windows look out on a topiary knot garden and a moat full of weeds, and in the yard at the back of the house the disused stable block is crammed with timber.
Woodsmoke from a fire in the heart of the house curls up into the sky. It is not surprising that myths cling to this place which marks the start of the Exmoor wilderness.
For centuries the home of the Sydenham family, who made their fortune in sheep farming on Exmoor, it has entered folklore because of the Drake connection.
During the 1580s the beautiful daughter of the house, Elizabeth Sydenham, captivated Sir Francis Drake after the death of his first wife. She agreed to marry him, but grew tired of waiting for him to return from sea and was about to marry someone else when Drake got to hear of the matter.
So the story goes, he halted the wedding by firing a cannonball through the roof of nearby Stogumber Church before vows could be exchanged. Another version has him rolling a cannonball down the aisle. Another theory is that the heavy iron sphere was in fact was a meteorite. What is historical fact is that Elizabeth did marry Drake in 1585 in the church at Monksilver, the village closest to Combe Sydenham.
A portrait of Elizabeth - the original hangs in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich - is on display in the Court Room, one of the rooms painstakingly restored by current owners William and Tessa Theed. So is the cannonball, which comes complete with a curse that it should never be removed from the house.
"She was a gorgeous girl and you can well understand that Drake would have homed in on her," says William.
"It is a wonderful, wonderful story. I don't need to decide if I believe it. The story behind it in a nutshell was that Drake, before going off on one of his world voyages, visited Elizabeth to ask her to remain faithful to him until he returned, but the Sydenham family were not overly thrilled because Drake was very much a pirate.
"Elizabeth was persuaded to marry a local squire, which she very reluctantly agreed to, but on arrival at the church on a very windy wet day the meteorite fell through the roof, and she said that must be a message from Sir Francis. He returned, not quite on the next tide but very soon after, and they got married in Monksilver church."
