15/11/19
On our trip to St. Michael’s Mount we ended up signing up for National Trust membership. We’d never thought about the benefits before but, realising that we tend to go to National Trust properties a lot when escaping London every other Sunday, we realised that it would actually be very much worth our while.
With our new memberships in hand, we decided to spent yet another rainy day in Cornwall being shown around another old house. This time we went to the Godolphin estate.
It had very strong folk horror vibes and is also supposedly home to the oldest walled garden in Western Europe, according to archaeologists. Our guide mostly told us all about how much of a fuck-up the place was. It had been a prominent estate at one point, home to some very important lord, but the groundskeepers over the years had done very strange things to try and keep it in shape. The National Trust has spent tens of thousands of pounds mostly undoing a load of historic bad craftsmanship.
The gardens, despite being pristine now, are also a bit of a dumping ground. Gardeners dig up archaeological treasures every week, the guide said, and showed up many of them. The site could have a museum all of its own as a microcosm of Cornish history.
Later we went to Falmouth and did a bit of seal-spotting off Pennance Point. We saw nothing but the sunset was nice.