estateCountry House Rescue · Season 2, Episode 5 · Aired April 1, 2010
Kelly House
Kelly, Devon
This one survived. It remains in business.
What happened after
900-year Kelly family seat; open for guided tours, events, and luxury B&B rooms, with an upcoming 'Poison In The Garden Tour' dated 2026-08-02.
What happened on the show
Kelly House sits in the village of Kelly in Devon, a Grade I listed manor looking out toward Bodmin Moor that the Kelly family have held for close to a thousand years. That extraordinary continuity was exactly what was at risk: the historic home was crumbling around the family who had lived there for a millennium, and without intervention the run would end on their watch. Ruth Watson approached it on two fronts at once. First, a plan to get some of the urgent conservation and reconstruction done quickly, before further decay set in. Second, and inseparable from it, a look at how the estate at Kelly could generate the revenue needed to keep the house standing for the long term. It is the central bargain of the whole series in one house: to save a place this old, the family had to let it start earning, opening the doors and the grounds to the paying visitors who could fund the repairs that heritage alone would never pay for.
After the cameras left
Kelly House is very much alive and trading. As of our latest verification pass the nine-hundred-year family seat is open for guided tours and events and offers luxury bed-and-breakfast rooms, and the clearest currency signal is a specific forward-dated event on its calendar, a Poison in the Garden tour set for August 2026. We fetched the official site directly and found that listing, which is about as strong a live signal as a country house gives. So the family who were watching their home crumble in the village of Kelly turned it into a working visitor and accommodation business, exactly the mix of tours, events and paying guests Ruth argued would keep the millennium-old seat standing.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.