Pencarrow House
Jamaica Inn will only accept bookings for two nights at weekends so we delayed our return home to Monday morning and needed to find another destination today – which turned out to be Pencarrow House.
On the way there using the A389 I find that the somewhat surprise find of rail embedded in the road between Bodmin and Dunmere where the L&SWR line used to cross the road which I first encountered in 2013 remain in situ. I gather from online resources that the same applies on other minor road crossings in the Camel Valley. Regrettably it all closed long before I could ever visit it.
Arriving by the advertised route (and ignoring the sat nav instructions) requires the car to pass through the site of an Iron Age Hillfort – so it has been an area which has been inhabited for many centuries prior to the house being built. It is possible to walk through the extensive grounds to see the Fort – but when we arrived it was raining and when we had finished the tour of the house it felt that it might rain again – although it did not actually do so but was enough to discourage a lengthy walk. Reportedly there are peacocks in the grounds but we did not see them today.
Pencarrow House, unlike most of the locations visited on this holiday, is not National Trust owned and it remains used to a limited extent by the Molesworth-St Aubyn family and so the arrangements are slightly different. We are met at the front of the property by the guide who then discourses for over an hour as she leads us around the open rooms of the house to show off the family heirlooms which remain in situ. No internal photographs are permitted as it remains private property due to insurance limitations.
Unlike most properties the front door does not open onto a magnificent hall as one might expect – it actually leads into the library – and we are assured that at some point the books have been read, many of them being State papers as family members were local MPs and similar. Why the library? We only find this out at the end of the tour when we are in what was once the hall.
One of the owners had the former front of the house laid down as an Italian Garden and visiting coaches and horses were regularly disturbing the beauty of this which led to a new front entrance into the library being constructed to prevent the garden from suffering damage and needing regular repair.
Colour at Pencarrow
Some of the stories told as we go around the house relate to relatively recent generations of the family. For example there is on display a Meissen Duck and the daughter accompanying tours used to remark that there were no mice visible, so some mice were added in a model which hides behind the duck and is brought out just in case she visits and asks after her “Mice and Duck” – much in the same way we were told a story about a Loch Ness Monster at the Castle of Mey. A couple of the other stories revolve around a rambunctious Labrador and his ability to behave unpredictably. A light lunch is taken in the tea room.
We return to Jamaica Inn for the evening meal and the following (Monday) morning we head off home. A30, A303, M3. Jackie doing just about half of the driving as far as Podmore and then I did the second half. It is one of the few long distance trips we have made over the years where we managed it in the time predicted by the AA route planner.