More anecdotes from Sam Marsden’s little book, and some anecdotes of our own:

“There is a ghost that comes out into the little meadow (corner meadow) at Trewince. She took all the silver from the house in the time of the Civil War – she took it out and buried it. And now she’s supposed to come back and look at it.”

“The ghost at Trewince was supposed to be by the Oak tree hanging over the hill, going down Trewince Road. It was supposed to be seen there and going down Pelyn.”

” When I was a parlour maid at Trewince, I saw someone pass the door. I thought it was the children playing pranks on me again. So I called out but there was no answer. I went out of the door and looked and there was no-one there. The coachman came in and said, ‘That was the grey lady you saw.'”

We used to wonder whether there was a real hoard of silver buried somewhere at Trewince. There had been rumours of a tunnel hidden away somewhere. One day, over 10 years ago, we were grubbing up some bushes in the front lawn with a JCB when suddenly a big hole opened up. The digger driver, a friend of ours who was helping us, leaped out of the cab and jumped down into the hole.

It turned out to be part of a tunnel which had partially collapsed. It led down towards the beach in one direction and back towards the house in the other, travelling under the front driveway. The walls of the tunnel were lined with a dry stone wall, and it was high enough to walk along in a slightly stooped position.

There was a clay pipe running along the floor and when we made enquiries, a local historian suggested that it might have been used for drainage from the house but ‘probably had more sinister usage’ ie. smuggling. It was just too elaborate for drainage.

We looked in the well around the cellar of the house and saw a bricked-up entrance in the wall. We knocked out the bricks and found the entrance to the tunnel.

Archaeologists in Truro were disinterested, but we found the dicovery very exciting. After a while, though, we had no alternative but to cover the hole in the lawn with a big board and leave the secret there for another generation to discover. And the buried treasure….??