What an awesome find, a survey of the town of Honiton and its slightly northern and north-western environs from 1765.
What particularly intrigues me is that the one closer to the left has been labelled Cockenhays or Hembury Fort House.
Samuel Graves, upon acquiring the estate in the early 1750s, enlarged and improved the manor house locally known as Cockenhays and was quick to re-name it Hembury Fort House after the local landmark, an Iron Age hill fort.
His reasons for doing so are unclear, though I would presume that, albeit a sailor and somewhat notorious for being "rough in his manner", Cockenhays just didn't suit the kind of genteel air an officer and a gentleman would have wanted to cultivate.
The locals, it seems, did not take to Graves's re-branding scheme; it may have been out of habit, out of a sense of preserving local tradition against a newcomer, or simply for reasons of speech economy; Cockenhays, after all, is one word, whereas Hembury Fort House (known among the Graves-family as The Fort) amounts to three.
Another instance of people defying Samuel Graves's new estate name can be found in the London Gazette, in which he, dated 10 February 1764, published two blackmail letters he had received, in which an unnamed person or group of people threatened that he would have his "House bloed abouet Your Years derickly [house blown about your ears directly]" if he would not agree to depositing the sum of fifty guineas "behain ye Gate Poss that goth into Cockney Street [behind the gate post that goes into Cockenhays Street]." These two letters were each time addressed to "Admardel [or in the second letter, Adrelmel] Graues at Cockney", indicating that the perpetrator(s) were locals-- people Graves knew who weren't local to the area would refer to his residence by Graves's preferred names of Hembury Fort House or more casually, The Fort.
These published letters reveal another potential issue why the name Hembury Fort House did never fully replace Cockenhays; in the context given describes "ye Gate Poss" where the blackmail letter was found, and where Graves was supposed to leave the fifty guineas as "the Falling-Gate Post [...] that leads into the Honiton Road, commonly called Cockenhay Street."
What is Cockenhay Street? Comparing the 1765 map with footage from Google Maps, the street going towards Honiton in the 18th century map has almost the exact same course as today's A373.
While time has since favoured Graves's choice of Hembury Fort House over Cockenhays, presumably connected to the the Honiton road, also known as Cockenhays Street, being renamed over time.
Another, less controversial discovery on this map is that it lists the Wolford church estate, which would some two decades later would be purchased from the owner, a Mr. Genest, by Graves' niece and godson Elizabeth and John Graves Simcoe, who tore down the old house, built a much bigger one on the site and dubbed it Wolford Lodge. The distinction became necessary because they also renovated the medieval church ruin and made it a place of family worship, now known as Wolford Chapel.
While Wolford Chapel and the (new) Wolford Lodge have fairly unmistakable names as the geographical indicator "Wolford" remained the same throughout the centuries, I wonder if there are still people local to the area who would know Cockenhays and Hembury Fort House are the same building, or if the old name has, as Samuel Graves wished for some 270 years ago, faded into obscurity.