Cornwall Heritage Trust presents ‘Tristan & Yseult’

This March, we’re partnering with Smashed Window Community Theatre to host an open-air improvised retelling of one of Cornwall’s greatest legends.

This raucous production will see a trio of actors perform an entirely improvised take on ‘Tristan & Yseult’. It’s epic, energetic and sure to have you crying with tears of laughter (and perhaps a few of sorrow too)!

Performances will take place on Sunday 24th March at 11am and 2.30pm at Indian Queens Pit near St Columb Major. Performances are 1 hour 30 minutes with an interval.

This production is recommended for ages 8+.

Adult tickets are priced pay as you feel at £10, £12 and £15. Tickets for those aged 16 and under are priced at £5.

This is an outdoor production, so please bring a chair or blanket to sit on and dress for the weather!

Smashed Window is a community theatre company based in Cornwall. Its team facilitates workshops and creates exciting new work, under the ethos that everyone should have access to a creative practice. 

Smashed Window has hosted creative workshops across Cornwall and created One Day Plays.

A Scheduled Monument, Indian Queens Pit was constructed as a preaching pit by local villagers in 1850 within a disused mining openwork. It was traditionally used by the local Methodist Chapels from Indian Queens and Fraddon, as well as a temperance society. Today, it remains at the heart of the local community and regularly hosts fetes, concerts and plays.

This event has been made possible by funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, and we’re hugely grateful for its support.

On Saturday 16th March, we’re hosting a public consultation day about Tregonning Hill. The event will take place from 10am – 2pm at Balwest Sunday School.

Tregonning Hill was purchased by Cornwall Heritage Trust in October 2023 to safeguard its future and ensure that it remains free to visit for everyone 365 days of the year. We have been overwhelmed by the number of thank yous, kind words and offers of support we’ve had about the site.

Thank you to everyone who has so generously offered to work with us to care for this special place! We’re keen to work with the community as much as possible and would love to hear your thoughts at this consultation day.

There will also be free guided walks at 10.30am and 1pm with local mining history specialist, Stephen Polglase. Places are limited and will be given on a first-come-first-served basis on the day.

Join us at Pendeen Village Hall for a special talk on the endangered craft of Cornish hedging this February.

Andrew has been a full-time hedger for 15 years, working throughout Cornwall. Renowned and consulted for his high standards of craftsmanship and extensive knowledge, he now brings his skill and experience to training the next generation of hedgers.

Helen became the first-ever craftswoman of the Guild of Cornish Hedgers in 2013 and built Cornish hedges for the next six years as part of her landscaping business. Passionate about hedging and its benefits to both the builder and the natural landscape, Helen is keen to ensure access for women and strengthen the connection between people and the landscape with rural skills.

If you would like to book a place, we recommend doing so without delay to ensure you have a spot. Our members were given early access to book their places at this event and there are a limited number remaining. Numbers are restricted and places are available on a first-come-first-served basis.

Please be aware that Cornwall Heritage Trust is photographing the event and may publish these photos in a variety of media and online.

Header Image Credit: ©Cornwall Council Strategic Historic Environment

The half term got off to a flying start this Monday at our Treffry Heritage Explorer Day. Thank you to everyone who came along for this time-travelling adventure into Cornwall’s industrial past!

Over 150 people headed to the Luxulyan Valley to learn about the incredible history of Treffry Viaduct, with highlights including engineering challenges, sensory activities and historic storytelling from Multivax. 

The site was a real hubbub of activity, and it was wonderful to see how much everyone enjoyed exploring this special place.

The history of the viaduct is closely intertwined with Cornwall’s railways, thanks to the branch line between Par and Newquay which runs directly under the monument and follows the historic route of the Cornwall Minerals Railway. Our team was therefore delighted to hear that almost half of those who attended the day made their journey there by train via Luxulyan Station, whilst many locals walked and cycled to the site. 

The event was funded by GWR, and we are hugely grateful for its generous support.

Following the huge popularity of our Discovery Club workshops over the last 12 months, we’re pleased to announce new dates for Spring/Summer 2024.

The workshops are priced at £5 per child per workshop, and you’re welcome to book your child onto as many as you wish.

We are anticipating high demand for these workshops and booking will open on Friday 9th February at 6pm via Eventbrite. Places are extremely limited and will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. 

These workshops have been made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and we’re hugely grateful for its support.

Parents and guardians may accompany their children but are also welcome to drop them off at the workshop if they prefer. Our Discovery Club Team Leaders are fully DBS checked and First Aid trained.

Prehistoric Art

Saturday 2nd March
10.30am – 12noon
St Gluvias Hall, Penryn TR10 8ER

Make your mark! Transform the ancient past into technicolour by making your own paints like our ancestors would have and creating a piece of prehistoric cave art.

Did you spot us on BBC Countryfile last night? We were thrilled that the Hurler Stone Circles were featured on the show!

Our Sites Officer, Dick Cole, was on hand to help the show explore the myths and legends which surround the site. You may have also spotted Merv Davey playing the Cornish pipes at ‘The Pipers’ standing stones.

Huge thanks go to Dick and Merv for braving a biting cold winter morning to share the story of this special place and to the BBC Countryfile team for featuring the site.

Close by on the southern edge of Bodmin Moor, this impressive line of three early Bronze Age stone circles is one of Cornwall’s most significant ceremonial prehistoric monuments. It’s such an important part of the remarkable ceremonial landscape on Bodmin Moor and we’re so pleased that it’s getting the attention it rightly deserves. What an honour!

The Hurler Stone Circles is one of 16 historic sites we care for here at Cornwall Heritage Trust. We believe that everyone should have access to Cornwall’s heritage, and that’s why these sites are all open to the public and free to enter 365 days a year.

For those who missed the Countryfile episode or would like to watch it again, it is available here on BBC iPlayer. The piece about the Hurlers is 43 minutes into the episode.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001w2vc/countryfile-bodmin-moor

We’re hosting a special Heritage Explorer Day at Treffry Viaduct this February half term, and invite you all to join us!

Taking place on Monday 12th February from 11am – 3pm, visitors will be transported back in time with storytelling, puppets, make and take activities, a family trail and even the chance to meet some of the characters from the viaduct’s past.

The activities are all free to take part in, there’s no need to book, and you don’t need to be members. Just come along and enjoy!

This event has been funded by GWR and we’re hugely grateful for its support.

Back in 2019, Cornwall Heritage Trust provided a small grant to help with the excavation of Penpol Tide Mill at Restronguet. Fast forward to 2024 and we welcomed Nick Johnson MBE to tell us more about the project and its findings. 

Nick was the head of the archaeological service in Cornwall from 1975 to 2010. As well as directing the surveys of the archaeological landscapes on Bodmin Moor and West Penwith, he helped in the development of new methods of defining and explaining the history and the significance of our historic landscapes. Perhaps most notably, he led the team that achieved World Heritage Site status for Cornish Mining in 2006.

He has published and lectured extensively and sat on national committees and councils, English Heritage and the National Trust amongst them, as well as many local heritage organisations including the Cornwall Archaeological Society, the Royal Cornwall Museum and the Trevithick Society. He now enjoys exploring and sharing the history of his home patch in Devoran.

Nearly 100 people joined us for this talk, which is available to watch in full here. Thank you to everyone who came along. We hope you found the talk as fascinating as we did!

Cornwall Heritage Trust CEO, Cathy Woolcock said: “It was such an informative and fascinating talk. It is always lovely for us to find out how the projects we’ve funded have turned out and incredibly special to see and celebrate their outcomes. Whilst this excavation was small in size, what it has uncovered is fascinating – it’s just amazing to see the ingenuity of our ancestors and to explore the effect they continue to have on our landscape today.”

The excavation was carried out by the Restronguet Creek Society and the local community. It was part-funded by Cornwall Heritage Trust and Cornwall Archeological Society, and Cornwall Archaeological Unit supervised the excavation. 

Cornwall Heritage Trust has received a revenue grant of £50,000 from the Garfield Weston Foundation.

A small independent charity, Cornwall Heritage Trust works to preserve and strengthen Cornwall’s unique heritage through its grant schemes, education projects and the managing of 16 historic sites across Cornwall. These sites, which include Tregonning Hill, the Hurler Stone Circles, Castle an Dinas, and Treffry Viaduct, are all open to the general public and free to enter throughout the year.

The money will support the charity’s focus on increasing the number of “At Risk” historic sites that it owns and growing the capacity of its in-house sites team to ensure that they are managed appropriately and sympathetically towards both their natural and historic environments.  

Cornwall Heritage Trust CEO, Cathy Woolcock explained: “This grant from Garfield Weston Foundation is fantastic news and will help progress our sites management enormously. Many of Cornwall’s historic gems are under threat. 246 places in the Duchy are currently listed on the Heritage At Risk Register, a number which is woefully under-representative of the true scale of the problem. Cornwall Heritage Trust is the only organisation in Cornwall actively seeking to save these sites, improve them and share them, free of charge, with the general public. With the cost-of-living crisis and the historically low wages in Cornwall, cost is a huge barrier to accessing heritage, and that’s why our work to protect and offer universal access to them is so important.”

The grant will also help build the charity’s growing education programme. This specifically aims to offer a wider cross-section of children and young people the opportunity to experience Cornwall’s heritage for themselves whilst also being accessible to all, especially those in deprived areas.

Cathy continued: “We believe that engaging with children and young people and inspiring them to learn about Cornwall’s heritage is one of the most important parts of our work, and this grant will also make a huge difference in developing our education programme. This ranges from growing our new selection of school workshops to creating more free resources and information guides which aim to make visiting our sites as easy as possible for as many people as possible. For a small charity like us, the importance of a grant like this is huge and we are extremely grateful to the Garfield Weston Foundation for its support.”

We are thrilled to announce that we are now caring for Cornwall’s smallest stone circle.

We’ve taken on the care of Duloe Stone Circle – an important ancient site at the southern end of the village of Duloe, between Liskeard and Looe. We will manage the stone circle on behalf of the Duchy of Cornwall.

Duloe Stone Circle survives as an oval ring of eight stones measuring 11.7m long by 10.2m wide. All the stones are white quartz (uniquely among Cornish circles) and seven are still upright. They vary in height from 1.0m to 2.4m and it has been calculated that around 35 people would have been needed to move and raise the four largest stones, which may weigh up to 9 tons and are placed approximately at the cardinal points, north, south, east and west. Four smaller stones fill the gaps between them.

Despite much research, stone circles are still mysterious sites. In Cornwall, they generally date from the later third and early second millennia BCE and are believed to have been gathering places for communities.

Activities seem to have included performance of ceremonies and rituals, some of which may have involved astronomical observation. Others probably related to the community’s own past, to their ancestors, and to the spirits that may have been believed to frequent important places. Duloe circle is now within fields but when built its position on a ridge between two deep and heavily wooded valleys was probably significant. The design of stone circles and the effort required to build them speak to us of increasingly sophisticated and well-organised societies.

The monument was first recorded in 1801 when Britton and Brayley wrote that: “Within a furlong north-east of the church [of Duloe], is a small Druidical Circle, that has not hitherto been noticed.”

The circle was bisected by a later hedge, which was removed in 1858. Shortly after, in 1863, three stones were re-erected and a Bronze Age urn, containing cremated human bones, was found somewhere on the site, either at the base of the fallen and broken northern stone when an attempt was made to raise it, or from within (or below) the bisecting hedge when that was removed. This discovery led to suggestions that the ring may encircle a low barrow.

Cathy Woolcock, Cornwall Heritage Trust CEO said: “The phrase ‘small but mighty’ always comes to mind with Duloe. Its size – the smallness of the circle but the largeness of the stones – is at the heart of what makes it unique and the experience of visiting there so special. It has been a long time coming to bring the stone circle into our care and we’re hugely grateful to the Duchy and Coodes Solicitors for all their support in making our management of it possible.”

Cornwall Heritage Trust now protects 16 historic places across Cornwall, which include Lammana Chapel, St Cleer Holy Well and Cross and Treffry Viaduct, as well as three other stone circles at the Hurlers.

Whilst some are managed on behalf of other bodies and organisations, the charity owns many of the sites it cares for, such as Tregonning Hill, which it purchased in November 2023.

The charity’s collection of sites has grown significantly over the last 18 months, and in order to support this increase, it recently launched a Historic Sites Fund Appeal to help it purchase and manage historic Cornish places.

It’s been an incredibly momentous 12 months here at Cornwall Heritage Trust and we hope you will enjoy reading all about it in our brand-new Impact Report 2022–23.

The review is a snapshot of the invaluable work we do to preserve and strengthen Cornwall’s heritage, and puts a spotlight on the amazing successes we’ve celebrated from April 2022 – April 2023.

It only takes about 15 minutes to read, and we hope you enjoy finding out about the multitude of ways we have continued to engage and inspire Cornish communities to connect with their distinct and unique heritage.

All this work is made possible by our members, donors, supporters and volunteers. This incredible community is at the heart of our mission to protect what makes Cornwall so special and we are hugely grateful for your support.