Qualla: Jamaica Inn

Jamaica Inn: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Coleman, CC BY-SA 2.0. Daphne du Maurier stayed here in 1930. She slept in a room that the inn still preserves, with her typewriter and writing desk on display. Six years later, she published Jamaica Inn - a novel about smuggling and wrecking on Bodmin Moor that turned this granite coaching house into one of the most famous fictional addresses in English literature. The book sold. Alfred Hitchcock made a film of it in 1939. Tourists arrived and have not stopped arriving since. But the inn itself was not built for the trade that made it famous in fiction. It went up in 1750 as a staging post on the road across the moor, where coach horses could be changed in the long crossing from Launceston to Bodmin, and it was named not for rum or contraband but for the Trelawney family of nearby landowners, two of whose members served as Governors of Jamaica in the eighteenth century. The novel borrowed the name. The name had a quieter origin.

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Image: Chris Coleman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Jamaica Inn: A Halfway House on the A30

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Linsdell from St. Andrews, Canada, CC BY 2.0. An inn has stood at this spot since 1547 - on the main road across Bodmin Moor, before the modern A30 was bypassed around the building - but the current granite structure dates from 1750. In 1778 it was extended with a coach house, stables, and a tack room arranged in an L-shape ...

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Image: Robert Linsdell from St. Andrews, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Jamaica Inn: Smuggling, Wrecking, and the Difficulty of Proof

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo Optik, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cornwall has been described, perhaps too neatly, as the "haven of smugglers" - all rocky coves, sheltered bays, tumultuous waves, and wild untenanted landscapes. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did see substantial smuggling along the coast, with networks bringing si...

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Image: Photo Optik | CC BY-SA 2.0

Jamaica Inn: Du Maurier's Bodmin

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Walker from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. Daphne du Maurier arrived at the inn in November 1930, riding across the moor on horseback with her friend Foy Quiller-Couch, daughter of the Cornish writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. They got lost in dense fog. They eventually found the inn by following the moor ponies. She wrote...

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Image: Tim Walker from United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Jamaica Inn: The Building Itself

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Henderson, CC BY-SA 2.0. It is a two-storey granite structure with a bitumen-coated slate roof and hipped ends. The symmetrical front windows of the original eighteenth-century facade were replaced in the twentieth century, along with the central door and gabled porch, flanked by two light casements. The...

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Image: Bill Henderson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Jamaica Inn: What the Museum Shows

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Johnson [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. The Museum of Smuggling is small but specific. Its core collection traces the smuggling trade as it operated along the Cornish coast - silks landed at Polperro on the south side, Boscastle and Trebarwith and Tintagel on the north, with goods routed inland through hidden caves, fa...

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Image: David Johnson [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0