Port Eliot’s Main House is open to visitors as pre-bookable tours, Monday – Friday, 11am – 12pm
An exciting new insight into the wonders and workings of the upstairs and downstairs throughout the decades and centuries.
Each House Tour last approximately one hour and includes the Saloon, Drawing Room, Round Room and the service basement that runs beneath them all.
House Tour
– Adults : £25
– Youth : £10 (under 18 years old, accompanied by an adult)
– Children : Free (under 5 years old, accompanied by an adult)
In addition to our House Tours we offer Exclusive House Tours where a member of the Eliot family will host your group.
Please email or call us to discuss this exclusive option.
Exclusive House Tour
– Adults : £40 (minimum of 2 people per tour)
– Youth : £20 (under 18 years old, accompanied by an adult)
– Children : Free (under 5 years old, accompanied by an adult)
Port Eliot would like to invite all ages and abilities, however, at present the House Tour requires visitors to use stairways and walk on varied surfaces. Please note that while under 5’s are permitted, the tour is not recommended for this age group.
Tours are limited to ten visitors and pre-booking is essential to ensure venue availability for the day of your visit.
As Port Eliot is still a private home, ticket sales cease two working days before the date of any tour.
Garden Walk ticket included in House Tour cost
The House at Port Eliot has been lived in for over 1000 years and believed to be the oldest continually inhabited dwelling in the UK and full of the accumulated treasures of such a long history.
The many varied rooms includes works by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Van Dyck as well as a vast mural by South West England’s most celebrated 20th century artist, Robert Lenkiewicz.
Once home to Augustinian monks and having survived confiscation by Charles I, Port Eliot is a unique treasure trove with the rare distinction of being a Grade-1 listed house with Grade-1 listed gardens.
The earliest written reference to Port Eliot is in a 9th-century Cornish liturgical fragment kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It refers to Ecclesia Lnanledensia, which is considered the pre-Christian name of this place.
The exact date of the foundation of St Germans priory is uncertain; probably it belonged to the Brito-Celtic age, and possibly even to the time of the great Germanus himself, who is likely to have been directly or indirectly the founder of the House.
While we were updating all our facilities to safely deliver the 2022 tour program to guests of all ages, abilities and interests, a selection of paintings were shown at The Box, Plymouth.
The exhibition explored the enduring friendship between the eighteenth century’s foremost portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Eliot family. What was it about Reynolds’ portraiture that attracted the Eliot family, and what does Reynolds’ approach to the portraits tell us about the lives and characters of his sitters? Highlights include Ann Bonfoy of 1755, and the remarkable, rare early group portrait The Eliot Family of 1746.
For more information please visit https://www.theboxplymouth.com/blog/press-release/reynolds-and-the-eliot-family