West Ogwell

West Ogwell is a village, civil parish and former manor in Devon, England, located 2 miles south-west of the town of Newton Abbot and 1 mile west of the village of East Ogwell. It is now administered by Teignbridge District Council. The church and manor house "lie hidden away on their own".

The disused former parish church (West Ogwell Church), which stands next to the manor house, was built in the 13th-century and is a grade I listed building. Since 1982 it has been owned by the Redundant Churches Fund. In the opinion of Pevsner it is of exceptional interest "both for its early structure undisturbed by the usual Perp(endicular) remodelling and because its simple and charming late Georgian interior has escaped radical Victorian restoration".Polwhele (1793) wrote of West Ogwell Church: "West Ogwell is a very small parish containing no more than thirty-five inhabitants...West Ogwell Church is dark and damp".

West Ogwell House, the former manor house of West Ogwell, stands next to the church and is a Georgian structure built in 1790 by Pierce Joseph Taylor. In the opinion of Pevsner it has an "overwhelmingly plain exterior (with) no decoration whatever". It incorporates some remains from the former manor house of the Reynell family (whose earliest Devonshire seat was at adjoining East Ogwell), including stables and outbuildings built in 1588 by Thomas Reynell, as the surviving datestone in the wall of the lean-to building in the courtyard attests by its inscription Anno Domini 1588 T. R.. In 1943 it became the Convent of the Companions of Jesus the Good Shepherd (founded 1920), and a chapel was added in 1955. In 1996 the Convent moved to Windsor and joined with the Community of St John Baptist, and sold West Ogwell to the Gaia House Trust (the then Gaia House being situated at the Old Vicarage in nearby Denbury) whereupon it became the home of a Buddhist centre, which changed the name of the building to "Gaia House", and uses it as "a quiet retreat for meditation and contemplation".

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