Egloskerry is a village and
civil parishIn England, a civil parish is a territorial designation and in some places the lowest tier of local government, below districts and counties. A civil parish can alternatively be known as a town, village, neighbourhood or community by resolution of its parish council; and in a limited number of...
located about five miles (8 km) north west of
LauncestonLaunceston is a town, an ancient borough, and a civil parish in the north of Cornwall, United Kingdom...
in
CornwallCornwall is a county of England in the United Kingdom, forming the tip of the south-western peninsula of Great Britain. It is bordered to the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Taken with the...
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
,
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
. The parish consists of the village of Egloskerry and many outlying hamlets and farms, including Tregeare,
BadharlickBadharlick is a hamlet in Cornwall, situated half way between the villages of Tregeare and Egloskerry....
and Trebeath. There are of land and of water in the parish.
During the earliest
censusA "census" is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population.In other words every 10 years...next one would be in 2010 The term is used mostly in connection with...
of 1801, the parish had 307 inhabitants. The population increased to a peak in 1841, when 552 people were recorded in the parish.
Egloskerry is a village and
civil parishIn England, a civil parish is a territorial designation and in some places the lowest tier of local government, below districts and counties. A civil parish can alternatively be known as a town, village, neighbourhood or community by resolution of its parish council; and in a limited number of...
located about five miles (8 km) north west of
LauncestonLaunceston is a town, an ancient borough, and a civil parish in the north of Cornwall, United Kingdom...
in
CornwallCornwall is a county of England in the United Kingdom, forming the tip of the south-western peninsula of Great Britain. It is bordered to the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Taken with the...
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
,
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
. The parish consists of the village of Egloskerry and many outlying hamlets and farms, including Tregeare,
BadharlickBadharlick is a hamlet in Cornwall, situated half way between the villages of Tregeare and Egloskerry....
and Trebeath. There are of land and of water in the parish.
Population
During the earliest
censusA "census" is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population.In other words every 10 years...next one would be in 2010 The term is used mostly in connection with...
of 1801, the parish had 307 inhabitants. The population increased to a peak in 1841, when 552 people were recorded in the parish. Thereafter, the population steadily decreased to its lowest point of only 275 people in 1981. Since then, there has been a consistent increase in people living in the parish, with 374 persons residing there in 2001.
History of Egloskerry and Penheale
In the village is the 15th century church of St. Keri and
St. PetrocSaint Petroc is a 6th century Celtic Christian saint. He was born in Wales but primarily ministered to the Britons of Dumnonia which included the modern counties of Devon , Cornwall , and parts of Somerset and Dorset...
with original Norman wall and transept.
The Penheale Estate is located within the parish and Penheale was mentioned as one of 284 manors in Cornwall by the
Domesday BookThe Domesday Book is the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086, executed for William I of England, or William the Conqueror...
of 1086. The Rev. Henry Addington Simcoe, son of
John Graves SimcoeJohn Graves Simcoe was the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada from 1791-1796...
, purchased the estate in 1830 and was
curateFrom the Latin curatus , a curate is a person who is invested with the care, or cure , of souls of a parish. In this sense it correctly means a parish priest. In Anglican churches, however, the term is usually used for an assistant priest or deacon...
of Egloskerry from 1822 to 1846. He was married twice and had eleven children. Simcoe wrote and published many books from his own printing press at Penheale. He died at the manor house on 15 November 1868 and was buried in the village churchyard five days later.
The manor house of Penheale, a mile from the village, is early 17th century though on the site of a mediaeval house. During the 1920s, Norman Colville acquired Penheale and made extensive renovations and additions through the assistance of the famous English architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. The original house can be dated to ca. 1620-1640, part of the gatehouse late 18th century: Lutyens's extension is to the south.
North Cornwall Railway
Egloskerry railway station opened on 3 October 1892 when the London & South Western Railway, or LSWR, opened a line between
LauncestonLaunceston is a town, an ancient borough, and a civil parish in the north of Cornwall, United Kingdom...
and Tresmeer. The small goods yard at the station closed on 9 May 1960 and the station completely a few years later. On 3 October 1966, the
line that passed through EgloskerryThe North Cornwall Railway was a railway line running from Halwill in Devon to Padstow in Cornwall via Launceston, Camelford and Wadebridge, a distance of 49 miles 67 chains. Opened in the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was part of a drive by the London and South Western Railway to...
closed entirely.
Literary references
- Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels...
, in Chapter 36 of A Pair of Blue EyesA Pair of Blue Eyes is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1873.The book describes the love triangle between a young woman, Elfride Swancourt, and her two suitors from very different backgrounds. Stephen Smith is a socially inferior but ambitious young man who adores her and with whom she shares...
first published in 1873:
"Why, the man in Hill Street, who plays and sells flutes, trumpets, and fiddles, and grand pianners. He was talking to Egloskerry, that very small bachelor-man with money in the funds. I was going by, I'm sure, without thinking or expecting a nod from men of that glib kidney..."
Hardy, Thomas (2005),
A Pair of Blue Eyes, Oxford University Press, 320.
- In the second book, Heather, of a trilogy written by John Trevena (the pseudonym of Ernest George Henham
Ernest George Henham was a Canadian-British author who wrote novels at the beginning of the 20th Century about Dartmoor and Devon, England. He also published literary works under the pseudonym John Trevena.-General Background:Ernest G...
) and published in 1908:
On a cold March day any traveller by the North Cornwall line may feel conceited as well as numbed. He shivers because the wind tries to shatter the windows from Egloskerry onwards; he is proud because he cannot think what the railway would do without him; for two or three shilings he has apparently bought the train, a rheumatic locomotive which wobbles and totters seawards, and a lot of little weather-beaten stations with two or three dummy men thrown in at each one, looking like Shems, Hams and Japhets standing on wooden plates all ready for the Ark.
Trevena, John (1908),
Heather, Alston Rivers, Ltd. London, 424.
- John Betjeman
Sir John Betjeman, CBE was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack". He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture...
, in his 1960 autobiography Summoned by BellsSummoned by Bells, the blank verse autobiography by John Betjeman, describes his life from his early memories of a middle class home in Edwardian Hampstead, London to his premature departure from Magdalen College, Oxford....
:
...
The emptying train, wind in the ventilators,
Puffs out of Egloskerry to Tresmeer
Through minty meadows, under bearded trees
And hills upon whose sides the clinging farms
Hold Bible Christians. Can it really be
That this same carriage came from Waterloo?
...
Trevena also mentions the rail station at Egloskerry in
First and Last Loves
Green Southern Railway engines came right into the brown and cream Great Western district of Cornwall, to reach Padstow, Launceston, Egloskerry, Otterham, Tresmeer, Camelford -- and so on, down that windy single line. I know the stations by heart, the slate and granite-built waiting rooms, the oil lamps and veronica bushes...
Legal precedent
- In an 1898 opinion from the Queen's Bench titled Simcoe v. Pethick, certain property had been set aside for residents in the village of Egloskerry to remove turf, subject to oversight by the churchwardens and overseers of the poor. Pethick entered on the land and removed wood over the objection of the lord of the manor, Simcoe, the son of Rev. Henry Addington Simcoe, who claimed that he had the ownership rights to the land and to the removal of turf and wood. The court held that the churchwardens and overseers had the legal right to regulate the manner in which turf could be removed from the property, not the lord of the manor. Simcoe v. Pethick, 2 Q.B. 55(1898). The case was widely cited as an important precedent for public land rights in England.