I asked David to pick one of half-a-dozen shots from our trip out today that I would post as my pic for today. He chose this one. I’m kind of surprised because it is, after all, a holiday-esque snapshot that could just as easily have been taken on a cheap pns as on my camera and it’s got all sorts of other flaws…..however, I asked him to chose so I’m going to abide by his decision.

So, what is this pile that stands behind DM? It’s the gatehouse of a grand old country house called Lanhydrock, part of which is Jacobean and the rest was re-built in the 1880s after much of the original was razed to the ground in 1881 in a huge fire.

These days it’s a National Trust property but we have a special interest in it and a link with its former owner, Thomas Charles Agar-Robartes, 6th Viscount Clifden, who died in 1930.

Our last home (our first in Cornwall) was owned by the Viscount and he sold it to a sitting tenant in 1920 for £20 – we paid rather a lot more for it and we reckon it’d not had much done to it in the 84 intervening years! The deeds were signed-over by him to the new owners of the freehold whose family lived there for a further 46 years, until the wife died in 1966.

We now know that he had a specific policy of allowing his tenants to buy freeholds from him in a certain set of circumstances – in normal circumstances, I’d have photographed the notice in his office but the NT won’t allow photos in the house and I can’t remember the detail because that’s another of the things I’m cack at.

The cottage was built for mineworkers who worked the smaller of his two Cornish tin/copper mines in the early 1800s. Locally it’s thought that the houses were given sizable parcels of land because it helped the mineworkers to support themselves by growing produce or rearing animals, though there is no documentary evidence to support this theory. In fact, our neighbours (Santa 1 and Santa 2) know they had a pig sty in their back garden and our own predecessors sold a small part of our back garden to a neighbour for a pig so that was obviously a common transaction thereabouts.

We still have a thirst to know more about all of this and as we were walking around the house, we got chatting to an old boy who was volunteering for the NT. He recommended the county records office as a good source of information about our little house and we think that’s a splendid idea.

So, to complete the circle, here is David in front of a pile, on a day when we found out a bit more about our own pile and do you think he looks like he’s suffering from them too???!!!

Last year, things seemed a bit sweeter, even if it did all go sour in the end (the benefit of hindsight eh?)