The French Garden House and surrounding garden dates from the very early years of the 19^th century. It was the product of collaboration between perhaps the most artistic of the male Edgcumbes and his young wife, Sophia. The garden contained elements of classical formality in the box-bordered parterres but the overwhelming feeling was one of romanticism, with copious trellises bedecked in fragrant climbing plants.

‘Arguably the finest building in the country park, particularly for its rich interior decorative features’. So said councillors from the Joint Committee responsible for the Country Park soon after they became its custodians, The English Garden House was constructed sometime after 1718 and before 1729 when it first appears on maps. It functioned as a banqueting house for the Edgcumbe family and visitors throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Mount Edgcumbe was tragically burnt to a shell when it was hit by an incendiary bomb intended for the dockyard at Devonport during WW2. The very limited funds available from the war reparations funds, together with the lack of inherited wealth available to the 6^th Earl when he took over during the war years, imposed serious constraints on what could be achieved when rebuilding commenced in 1957. The original building, though, was of great historic importance and enough survived to provide an understanding of a design that was at least a generation ahead of its time.

The Garden Battery is a casemated construction built largely in granite in 1862-3 directly on top of the Mount Edgcumbe Battery. It was part of the wide-ranging developments around Plymouth Sound to resist possibly invasion by the re-equipped and technologically advanced French Navy.