Sherborne Lodge. After passing through Sherborne on the way to Plymouth Sir Walter Raleigh fell in love with the Castle and Queen Elizabeth relinquished the estate, leasing it to Raleigh in 1592. Rather than refurbish the old Castle Raleigh decided to construct a new lodging for temporary visits, in the compact form for secondary habitations of the nobility and gentry, often architecturally sophisticated that was known as a lodge. The new house Sherborne Lodge, was a four-story, rectangular building completed in 1594. The antiquary John Aubrey remembered it as " a delicate Lodge in the park of brick, not big, but very convenient for its bignes, a place to retire from the Court in Summer time and to contemplate. It had four polygonal corner turrets with angled masonry as if they were actually to serve for military defence which Nicholas Cooper suggests "may be an obeisance to the old building".[3] Its most progressive feature for its date was the entrance, disguised in one of the corner towers so as not to spoil the apparent symmetry of the facade, which was centered on a rectangular forecourt. The entrance vestibule also contained a winder stairwell and gave directly on the hall.
During Raleigh's imprisonment in the Tower, King James leased the estate to Robert Carr and then sold it to Sir John Digby 1st Earl of Bristol in 1617. In the 1620s the Digby family, in order to suit the lodge to a more permanent seat, added four wings to the house in an architectural style similar to the original retaining the original corner towers.
