Qualla: Mount Edgcumbe House

Mount Edgcumbe House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darren Rosson, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the night of 22 April 1941, German bombers came for Plymouth, and the firestorm that consumed the city's centre reached far enough west to find a Tudor house on the Rame Peninsula. Mount Edgcumbe House, built by Sir Richard Edgcumbe between 1547 and 1553, burned through the night. By morning the roof was gone and the interiors were ashes. Four hundred years of family portraits, furniture, and accumulated objects were destroyed in a single raid. The house stood gutted and roofless for seventeen years. Then, in 1958, the 6th Earl decided to rebuild. The shell was sound, the foundations were good, and the family was determined that what could be recovered would be recovered. The restored interiors, in their 18th-century styling, opened to the public in 1988, a slow and patient response to a single night's destruction.

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Image: Darren Rosson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mount Edgcumbe House: The House That Inspired Wollaton

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lobsterthermidor (talk) 22:03, 15 December 2016 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0. Sir Richard Edgcumbe built the original Mount Edgcumbe House over six years in the mid-sixteenth century, choosing a site on the Rame Peninsula that commanded long views across Plymouth Sound. The architecture was striking enough that the great Elizabethan designer Robert Smythso...

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

Mount Edgcumbe House: The Cremyll Ferry

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rarb, CC BY 3.0. The estate has been connected to Plymouth by ferry since around 1204, more than eight centuries of continuous service across the narrow neck of Plymouth Sound. The Cremyll Ferry still operates today, carrying foot passengers between the village of Cremyll at the estate's main gat...

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Image: Rarb | CC BY 3.0

Mount Edgcumbe House: Camellia Country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. Today Mount Edgcumbe Country Park houses the National Camellia Collection, a comprehensive gathering of one of the great ornamental flowering plants of the temperate world. Camellias love the soft, damp Cornish climate, with its long mild winters and gentle summers, and they bloo...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mount Edgcumbe House: The Park and the House

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darren Rosson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cornwall Council and Plymouth City Council have jointly owned the estate since the 7th Earl sold it in 1971. The Country Park is open every day from 8 am till dusk; visitors can walk all the way from the Cremyll Ferry through the property to the painted fishermen's villages of Ki...

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Image: Darren Rosson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mount Edgcumbe House: Five Centuries on the Edge of the Sound

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the upper terraces of the house the view is unchanged in its essentials since the Tudor builders chose it. Plymouth Sound opens to the east, the breakwater lying like a punctuation mark across its mouth. To the south the limestone cliffs of the Hoe rise above the water. The ...

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Image: Tony Atkin | CC BY-SA 2.0