The south front of Trerice house.
It's been sometime since I've posted on a visit to a stately home: Those days seemed to have long-faded since I left my National Trust retirement job at Blickling hall in 2010. The cares of the world around me, about which I can do nothing but comment, have rather weighed on me recently! It was therefore a balm at the beginning of May to visit the obscure National Trust property in Cornwall called "Trerice House". It's really too small to do justice the name "Stately Home", but its unassuming size, obscurity and a location which is only accessed down narrow sunken Cornish roads, give it that "away from it all" atmosphere. Not surprisingly, then, my mind has often returned to our afternoon in the peaceful tranquility of Trerice house.
The gardens and the west wing
The main south facing "E" shaped wing of the house was built in the 1570s, in Elizabethan times (Hence the "E" shape, apparently), but it was, in fact, an extension of an earlier and less grand manor house (and/or farmhouse) to the west of what is now the main building. After a succession of absentee landlords and a period of neglect the east side of the "E-wing" collapsed in the 1860s but was restored by the National Trust (thanks in part to the generosity of its tenant Mr. Jack Elton) after they bought the house in 1953.
The great hall
As one enters the property through the "screens passage" one finds a door on the left which gives entrance to a classic great-hall illuminated by a huge south facing window of 576 panes of glass, many of which are the original rippled glass. The plaster work on the ceiling is very fine and dates to the 1570s but has been restored in the 1840s giving it a very crisp and new appearance contrasting with the generally well used and aged appearance of the house as a whole. Over the years the house has been pulled around, extended and changed and a tour by an architectural archeologist while we were there pointed out all the anomalies that are evidence of the chops and changes of a property evolving to fit the demands of the day.
Unlike those much larger and grand stately houses Trerice felt like a real home. One reason for this may be because I live in a Victorian Terraced house whose layout, like Trerice, is on the line of lineal development of the time honored one room house of ancient times: In times gone by everyone lived in one-roomed huts & houses, or if one was of high status, they were big enough to be called "halls", a space where everything, from socializing, cooking and sleeping took place. Eventually rooms were added on to the main living space of the hall; kitchens, pantries and private rooms. As wealth increased the chimney came along splitting many halls into a parlor and dining room. My own Victorian terraced house still has this vestigial configuration with the parlor as the front room and the dinning room at the back, both rooms separated by outsized back-to-back chimney stacks that were once the main source of heating for the house.
As Sir Kenneth Clarke said in part 7 of his Civilization series (Grandeur and Obedience) "I wonder if a single thought which has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room". Trerice house is small enough, homely enough and cozy enough to be a house that encourages thought especially on a dark winter night on the Cornish peninsular when the huge canopy of the night sky is studied with stars, the clouds of the Milky Way are shining and there is a bright fire in the grate.
The plaster work on the ceiling of the hall
