BY CHARLES EVANS

Family feuds long kept alive the custom of local warfare in the West Country. So when Sir Richard Edgecumbe returned with Henry Tudor (1485) to his manor beside the Tamar from which a neighbour had driven him, he rebuilt the house strongly in granite, set around a courtyard and with a formidable gate.

Cothele in Cornwall seems as if left unaltered since the seventeenth century along with weapons hanging on its walls. The parlours and bedrooms contain a wealth of seventeenth century furniture and tapestry, which drawings made in 1840 show them as they are now. The early Tudor chapel is no less intact with original stained glass and woodwork.

Advantage has been taken of the house’s position above a steep slope to the Tamar to create a notable garden of semi-exotic shrubs in the mild climate. The Earl of Mount Edgecumbe presented Cothele to the National Trust in 1946.