lucky win - Combe Martin, Devon
Pack O' Cards pub constructed about 1690 by local squire George Ley, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/3ud49A83r9">www.flickr.com/gp/52219527@N00/3ud49A83r9</a> who, it is said, celebrated his good luck at card games when, after winning a large sum of money, built a house on a plot of land measuring 52 × 53 feet, representing the cards in a pack plus the joker.  It has four floors representing the 4 suits, with 13 doors and fireplaces on each floor equaling the number of cards in each suit, and 52 stairs. Before the imposition of the window tax, the panes in all the windows added up to the total value of a pack of cards.
Eventually the house passed out of the hands of the Ley family, but it is not certain when exactly the building became an inn.   Records show that it was serving that function early in the 19c, when in 1822 it    The hotel is said to have been visited by the author Marie Corelli, who supposedly wrote part of her novel The Mighty Atom (1896) in the &quot;Corelli Room&quot; on the third floor, at a desk still preserved there   The inn was renamed the Pack o' Cards on 1 June 1933, but it had probably been known by that name for many years before that date.
In spite of 20c alterations, much of the joinery and moulded cornices in the ground floor have survived.   The first and second floors are largely original and untouched, with decorative plaster ceilings to the main first floor room in the left-hand wing and to the through-corridor.  Nikolaus Pevsner describes it as the only noteworthy building in the village, being &quot;a rare folly, built on a cruciform plan with a towering display of symmetrically grouped chimneys, eight together&quot;. The hotel featured on The Paul Daniels Magic Show on BBC television in 1987.
The Pack o' Cards remains an inn and has been a Grade II* listed building since 1953

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pub devon combe martin combemartin