Qualla: Cotehele

Cotehele: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geertivp, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1483, Sir Richard Edgcumbe was being hunted through these Cornish woods by forces loyal to Richard III. He escaped - by some accounts, by stuffing a stone into his cap and dropping it into the Tamar so his pursuers heard a splash and assumed he had drowned. Two years later, after fighting for Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth, he came back to Cotehele with the new king's favour, knocked down the old manor house, and started building. The chapel he raised in the woods east of the house, with its patron saints St George and Thomas Becket, was a thanksgiving for that escape. The house his family went on to build, finished by his son Sir Piers between 1489 and 1520, has been called the least-altered Tudor house in the United Kingdom. Granite, slate-stone, dovecote, mill, formal gardens stepping down to a quay on the Tamar - barely a stone of it has moved in five centuries.

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Image: Geertivp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cotehele: The Edgcumbe Inheritance

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lobsterthermidor (talk) 22:03, 15 December 2016 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0. Cotehele came to the Edgcumbe family by marriage. William Edgcumbe wed Hilaria, heiress of Cotehele, and the estate passed into the family that would build the house. The earliest structure on the site dates from around 1300, and various alterations were made in the early fifteen...

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Image: Lobsterthermidor (talk) 22:03, 15 December 2016 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cotehele: The Tudor Clock That Still Runs

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geertivp, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the chapel on the west side of Hall Court, dedicated to St Katharine and St Anne, hangs a clock that is among the oldest still-functioning mechanical clocks in England. It dates from the Tudor period and has run, with maintenance, for more than five hundred years. The chapel i...

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Image: Geertivp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cotehele: Down to the Quay

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Kennedy, CC BY-SA 2.0. The gardens at Cotehele step down a steep wooded valley from the house to a quay on the River Tamar. Formal terraces near the top give way to a richly planted lower garden, with features that range across centuries: a medieval dovecote in remarkable condition, a stewpond, a Victo...

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Image: Neil Kennedy | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cotehele: Two Hundred and Fifty Apple Trees

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Cornfoot, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2008, the National Trust planted a Mother Orchard at Cotehele - more than two hundred and fifty apple trees, mostly West Country varieties, divided across eight acres into eating, culinary, and cider sections. The orchard is intended as a living genetic library of regional app...

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Image: Roger Cornfoot | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cotehele: Condy's Watercolours, Nunn's Twelfth Night

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Platt, CC BY-SA 2.0. The artist Nicholas Condy (1793-1857) spent years painting Cotehele in watercolours and oils, patronised by the second and third Earls of Mount Edgcumbe. His painting The Court Dinner at Cotehele, along with various exterior views of the house, hangs at Mount Edgcumbe rather than...

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Image: Adrian Platt | CC BY-SA 2.0