Qualla: Trevalga

Trevalga: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BaldiusMaximus, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 29 September 1934, a man named Gerald Curgenven bought the entire Manor of Trevalga - houses, fields, coastline, and all - for £14,000. Twenty-five years later he died and left it in a charitable trust. The instructions in his will were simple. The hamlet was to be managed exactly as he had managed it: local families given priority, children allowed to take over their parents' tenancies, the landscape protected from development. Profits, after maintenance, were to go to his old school. For sixty years it worked. Trevalga remained one of the few corners of Cornwall without holiday homes, with multi-generational tenants in their family cottages. Then in October 2023 the trustees sold it to a property company for £16 million.

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Image: BaldiusMaximus | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trevalga: A Hamlet Older Than England

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Trevalga appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, held at the time by King William himself - it had previously been held by Queen Matilda and before her by Britric. Two ploughs were at work, with land for eight; there were fourteen households of serfs, villeins, and smallholders; th...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trevalga: Curgenven's Plan

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Johnson [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. Gerald Curgenven, the man who bought Trevalga in 1934 for £14,000, was a graduate of Marlborough College, a public school in Wiltshire. Over his lifetime he expanded the estate with five further properties in the vicinity. When he died in 1959 he placed everything in a trust with...

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

Trevalga: The Battle Begins

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (Liyster), CC BY 3.0. In 2010, Marlborough College received legal advice that the will trust was technically invalid because it breached the rule against perpetuities - an obscure rule of English property law preventing landowners from binding land in trust forever. As the only remaining beneficiary, ...

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Image: (Liyster) | CC BY 3.0

Trevalga: The Battle Ends

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maurice D Budden, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2019 it emerged that the trust as registered did not include preservation of the Manor as one of its charitable objects - the very thing Curgenven had specifically asked for. Residents secured another legal opinion confirming that preservation was nonetheless part of the trust...

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Image: Maurice D Budden | CC BY-SA 2.0

Trevalga: What Trevalga Means Now

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0. Trevalga is a small place. Its medieval long houses still stand. St Petroc's still holds Sunday services. The ruined eighteenth-century Trevalga Mill sits in fields by the Trevillet River, upstream of the waterfall now known as St Nectan's Kieve. The South West Coast Path still p...

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Image: Philip Halling | CC BY-SA 2.0