Exploring Cornwall - Trerice

chirp54
Jul 5
4 min read

We've never visited Cornwall and when I was planning our trip I realized that there were so many things to see and with only a week here there was no way we would see everything we wanted to. Our plan, then, was to visit whichever sites were within an hour of our digs. Today it was to be Trerice, a National Trust property about an hour north, on the road to Newquay.

They had another sign touting Speak Cornish Week and this one explained why so many names in Cornwall start with "tre." The prefix stands for farm or settlement. "Rice" means pond, so Trerice is a farm by the pond.

We were directed to the lawn outside the house entrance where a volunteer was just about to begin a talk about its history. Just as the talk began, so did the rain. We listened for a while then gave up and went into the house.

A little history first: Trerice is an Elizabethan manor and it remains little changed by the advances in building fashions over the centuries thanks to long periods under absentee owners. The Arundell family inherited Trerice through marriage around 700 years ago. By 1572 John Arundell V had begun building the house you can see today. (Ten years earlier his income had been boosted by marrying well.)

Son of the builder of Trerice, Sir John Arundell VI, earned the title "John for the King" due to his role in the Civil War. He successfully defended Pendennis Castle in Falmouth for King Charles I.

After the restoration of Charles II, Richard Arundell became Baron Arundell in recognition of the support he and his father had given to King Charles I. It was the marriage of John, 2nd Baron Arundell, to Margaret Acland in 1675 that eventually led to the Aclands inheriting Trerice. The Acland family had homes in Somerset and London and spent very little time at Trerice, trusting the land to the care of tenant farmers. Sir Thomas Dyke Acland never lived at Trerice but often stayed during his political visits into Cornwall. He also used the Great Hall for lavish entertaining of guests.

That's where we come back to our visit. The first room was the Great Hall with its enormous table. It's about 6 meters long and a meter and a half wide and is made of two long boards from a single tree, resting on a trestle bottom. When later owners redecorated the house, they got rid of most of the furnishings, but left the table in place because there was no way to get it out of the room without chopping it up.

There's an incredible window in the Great Hall made up of 576 panes.

Over the years, panes have been broken and replaced, but someone kept a record of all of the repairs and there's a map of sorts where you can see which panes come from which century.

Here are my picks for the highlights of the house:

The Darbyshire table with an Ashford Black marble table top, inlaid with colored Darbyshire marbles, c 1810:

The Tudor bed was donated to Trerice in the 1980s. It came in numbered pieces. When it was being reconstructed initials were found on the back of the bed head, perhaps belonging to craftsmen. The intricately carved head and upper rectangular panel date from 1600.

A singularly ugly portrait of an "Elizabethan Boy." I do hope that the artist had perspective issues and that the boy didn’t actually have a gigantic head.

“Letters Patent”, a document which attested to the fact that the Arundel family had been raised to the nobility.

The chough sign and chough banner, The chough is a an iconic Cornish bird, with a very distinctive bill, legs and call, and has appeared on flags and emblems in Cornwall for hundreds of years. In the chough room is the banner of the 11th Battalion Home Guard, based at Trerice, who chose the chough as their emblem. The last chough in Cornwall died in 1973. In 2001, three choughs returned from Ireland and settled on the Lizard (an area of Cornwall) bringing great joy to Cornish birders.

There are lovely gardens and since the rain had stopped, we walked around the estate to enjoy them.

There's a building called The Hayloft where hay used to be stored but which now contains costumes for kids to dress up like Elizabethans, and a really interesting series of posters which track the Arundells and the house through history. I found it fascinating because it included events from around the world. Here are a couple of examples.

On the way out we passed the Elizabethan Knot Garden.

I loved this tree with the twisted trunk.

We left Trerice and drove through the countryside looking for a pub that Bruce wanted to visit. The Albion dates from the 1600s, and though it didn't have a good pub lunch menu, they sold jewelry, which I found a bit puzzling, I admit.

While Bruce was enjoying his half pint, I walked down the lane and found what I think is the smallest National Trust site, Crantock Round Garden.

As the sign says, it was built to be a pound to enclose stray animals and is really quite tiny.

We left there and made our way to Smugglers' Den, a pub that dates to 1636 and which was expanded in 1778. It has a wonderful bar and it serves a terrific pub lunch.