Cotehele, Cornwall

The business end

Cotehele is a wonderful house (see previous posts about our visit last month) but I want to pay tribute to one aspect that visitors in a hurry (and Cotehele is not a place to hurry) might miss. It raises an interesting point about country houses and their estates. We are apt to think of these enormous houses as the retreats of a privileged class, isolated from the lives of the lower orders, who toil away in workshops or factories or on farms, places far removed from the life of ease lived in places like Cotehele. There’s much truth in that, but it’s a simplification. The countryside has always been a place of work – not just the hard toil of the farm, but also of the mill and the mine – and some of this activity is surprisingly near the local country house.

Beautiful Cotehele is itself close to industry. There is a mill on the estate and within walking distance of the house is Cotehele Quay, the place where vessels on the River Tamar could moor and unload or load their cargo. There were several local industries – mining for tin, copper or arsenic; lime burning, and market gardening. All of these were busy in the 19th century, bringing much traffic to the quay. The remains of limekilns can still be seen a stone’s throw from the water. Mines were nearby (the old Cotehele Consols mine was the nearest) and brought much wealth to the area until the late-19th century saw a decline that accelerated with the effects of the two World Wars. Market gardens produced apples, cherries, strawberries, and daffodils.

The surviving buildings on the quay include the limekilns and the warehouse in my photograph, now housing an exhibition about the history of the quay and its boats and industries. This was known in the early-20th century as Captain Bill’s Store, after Bill Martin, skipper of the Myrtle, whose main job was to carry grain for Cotehele flour mill, another bit of the area’s industrial history. The Myrtle’s working life came to an end when she was commandeered during World War II and blown up by one of the many bombs dropped on Plymouth. Cotehele Quay is a backwater now, but an essential part of the history of the area that most visitors find out about because of the big house.

Thorpeness, Suffolk

Wood and wind

When landlord Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie and his architect F. Forbes Glennie created Thorpeness as a holiday village, they gave it a fitting share of leisure facilities. A Workmen’s Club was joined by the Kursaal, a Country Club aimed at the middle-class visitors that Glennie hoped mainly to attract. This was accompanied in turn by the Meare, a lake on which there were boats for hire, and this boathouse. The clocktower gives the boathouse a grander air than the weatherboarded barn architecture seems to merit, but also makes it easy to find – and, I suppose, easy to know when your time is up in your hired craft on the lake. Nowadays the building on the left is a café, providing welcome refreshments for those who just want to admire the view or to watch the races in the annual regatta.

Part of the purpose of the boating lake was to keep children occupied, and many of the features around the lake were given a Peter Pan theme – there’s a Crocodile Island, apparently. The effect, in spite of the threat suggested by the imaginary crocodiles, is one of gentility, and is a far cry from the opportunistic seaside tat and kiss-me-quick architecture of some of the Lincolnshire resorts that I remember from my childhood. Visiting in winter, however, I was reminded that the stiff breeze blowing towards me from the North Sea was the same familiar chilly east wind. Useful for sailing, I suppose, but I hope those picturesque wooden walls are well insulated.

Purton, Gloucestershire

Strangers on the shore

The British have been building boats for millennia, and sailing them, and wearing them out. When boats are no longer sea-worthy, they end up on the shore, getting recycled in interesting ways. Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes lived in a hut made of an upturned boat, like the fishermen’s huts of Lindisfarne. Masts become maypoles. Figureheads are made into garden ornaments. Countless wood-framed houses are said to be built of ‘old ship’s timbers’. As the salmon-fishers at the end of Andrew Marvell’s poem Upon Appleton House knew (who ‘like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes’) there are many things you can do with a boat as well as sailing it.

Near Purton, on the eastern bank of the River Severn (there’s a Purton over on the western bank, too, just to confuse us all) old boats have been used in a remarkable way. The Severn, with its great tidal range, challenging currents, and acres of mudflats, is a huge changing ecosystem. It deposits silt here and washes away banks there. In some places the banks need reinforcing, and here, it is old boats that have been used over the years to bring some stability to the shore.

At Purton, more than just the river bank was at stake. The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, built to cut out some of the more difficult and winding stretches of the river on the way up to Gloucester, runs here parallel to the Severn and very close to its bank. In 1909, when the canal bank was threatened, a small fleet of old lighters was beached at Purton to reinforce the land and protect the inland waterway. As the years went by, more and more redundant vessels were beached here. Purton is now Britain’s largest ships’ graveyard.

Full or half-full of silt and tussocky vegetation, some 81 vessels reinforce the bank here. Timbers stick up from the ground; sometimes entire hulls remain, sometimes odd posts and tangles of ironwork. There are concrete boats too, and chunks of metal superstructure, and bits of old gearing.


They make a poignant collection ranging from Island Maid, built in Plymouth in 1863 and beached some time before May 1945, to the unpoetically named FCB 75, built in concrete by the Wates Building Group at Barrow in Furness in 1941 and beached in 1965. They were probably all as tough and utilitarian as FCB, but they had a job to do and they did it. And now they have another job, they do that too.