Qualla: Tehidy Country Park

Tehidy Country Park: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bassets held Tehidy for seven hundred years and somehow the building never quite got to stay built. The original manor was dismantled in 1497 by Cornish rebels who hated John Basset for being the Sheriff who marched against them. The replacement mansion of 1739 was demolished by the Bassets themselves in 1861 to make way for something grander. The grand 1863 house lasted half a century, was abandoned in 1915, and burned to the ground on 23 February 1919. By 1922 it had been completely rebuilt, this time as a tuberculosis hospital. None of these buildings was the point of Tehidy, exactly. The point was the 250 acres of beech and oak woodland the Bassets left behind, which now belongs to Cornwall Council and which the badgers, otters, swans, and weekend dog-walkers of Camborne have been quietly inheriting since 1983.

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Tehidy Country Park: Seven centuries of Bassets

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

William Basset married Cecilia, heiress of the de Dunstanville family, in the mid-twelfth century, and the manor of Tehidy passed into Basset hands as her dowry. The name is recorded as 'Tehidin' in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, derived from the Cornish 'ti', meaning a ho...

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Tehidy Country Park: The end of the Bassets

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 1888 the tin price was sinking and the mining income with it. Arthur Francis Basset inherited an estate he could no longer easily fund, and by 1915 the mansion was vacant. The next year, after seven centuries on the land, the family sold up. In 1918 the abandoned house was con...

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Tehidy Country Park: The woodland that was always there

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What Cornwall Council bought in 1983, and what 250,000 visitors a year come for now, was always the parkland rather than the house. The Bassets had laid out the woodland in the great-park English tradition: ash, alder, oak, beech, sycamore, birch and chestnut at the canopy, with ...

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Tehidy Country Park: What you do here now

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tehidy is one of four country parks in Cornwall, and the only one with this density of canopy cover. The park's facilities are unfussy: a permanent orienteering course laid out through the woodland, an events field for fetes and outdoor concerts, a campsite for schools and youth ...

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Tehidy Country Park: Flying over

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the air Tehidy is unmistakable in mining country: a single dark green block of mature woodland in the otherwise open landscape of fields and former workings between Camborne and the north coast. The lake at the southern edge catches afternoon light. The rebuilt Tehidy House ...

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