Qualla: Trerice

Trerice: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manfred Heyde, CC BY-SA 3.0. The date 1572 is carved above an overmantel in the Great Hall, and that single number explains nearly everything about Trerice. Sir John Arundell, High Sheriff of Cornwall, raised the main range here between roughly 1570 and 1573, grafting his fashionable E-plan house onto the older tower of an ancestor known as Jack of Tilbury. He could not have imagined that his Elizabethan manor would outlast the male line of his family, the barony they eventually carried, the absentee landlords who came after, and the dilapidation of a long Cornish century. Tucked three miles east of Newquay at Kestle Mill, far enough inland to feel quiet, Trerice survives as a near-intact specimen of the gentry house its builders meant it to be.

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Image: Manfred Heyde | CC BY-SA 3.0

Trerice: The Swallow and the Sheriff

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Johnson [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. The Arundells are everywhere at Trerice, even when no one is in the rooms. Their canting arms - sable, six martlets argent - turn the family name into a flock of swallows, a pun on the French hirondelle that the family kept through six centuries of Cornish life. The earliest hold...

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

Trerice: Jack-for-the-King

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EvaK, CC BY-SA 2.5. Two Arundells earned nicknames that stuck. The first was Jack of Tilbury, knighted at the Battle of the Spurs in 1513 and twice Sheriff of Cornwall, who probably extended the older tower into the bulky south wing. The second was his great-grandson, Sir John VII Arundell - Jack-fo...

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Image: EvaK | CC BY-SA 2.5

Trerice: The Table That Cannot Leave

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the Aclands inherited Trerice in 1802, they faced a problem common to absentee landlords - Cornwall was simply too far from Killerton, their Devon seat, to manage comfortably. Yet the 10th Baronet, Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, refused to let the house decline. Shortly before 1844...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Trerice: Decline, Choughs, and Rescue

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Murgatroyd49, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cornwall County Council bought Trerice in 1915 and treated it the way authorities often treat awkward old houses - the surrounding land was split into twelve farms and sold or leased, and the manor was left with twenty acres. In the summer of 1940, with German invasion expected, ...

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Image: Murgatroyd49 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trerice: What Survives

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hawgood, CC BY-SA 2.0. Trerice today is a Grade I listed Elizabethan manor with the two stone lions on the front lawn separately listed Grade II. The garden holds an orchard of old fruit varieties, the kind of mixed apples and pears that would have been familiar to the Arundells. Inside, the Great Hall...

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Image: David Hawgood | CC BY-SA 2.0