Egloskerry
| Egloskerry | |
| Cornwall | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | SX272866 |
| Location: | 50°39’14"N, 4°26’46"W |
| Data | |
| Population: | 549 (2011) |
| Post town: | Launceston |
| Postcode: | PL15 |
| Dialling code: | 01566 |
| Local Government | |
| Council: | Cornwall |
| Parliamentary constituency: |
North Cornwall |
Egloskerry is a village in eastern Cornwall, about five miles northwest of Launceston.
Egloskerry parish consists of the village itself and many outlying hamlets and farms, including Tregeare, Badharlick and Trebeath.
Population
During the earliest census 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 Petroc with original Norman wall and transept. The name comes directly from the Cornish language for 'Keri’s church'.
The Penheale Estate is located within the parish and Penheale was mentioned as one of 284 manors in Cornwall by the Domesday Book of 1086. The Rev. Henry Addington Simcoe, son of John Graves Simcoe, purchased the estate in 1830 and was curate 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 mediæval house. During the 1920s, Norman Colville acquired Penheale and made extensive renovations and additions through the assistance of the great 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.[1]
North Cornwall Railway
Egloskerry railway station opened on 3 October 1892 when the London & South Western Railway, or LSWR, opened a line between Launceston 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 [[North Cornwall Railway|line that passed through Egloskerry closed entirely.
Literary references
In the second book, Heather, of a trilogy written by John Trevena (the pseudonym of Ernest George Henham) 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, London, 424
John Betjeman, in his 1960 autobiography Summoned by Bells writes:
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.
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Egloskerry) |
References
- ↑ Nikolaus Pevsner: The Buildings of England: Cornwall, 1951; 1970 Penguin Books ISBN 978-0-300-09589-0page 135
- Colville, D. (1989). Penheale—The Rebirth of a House. In: Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall. Truro: R.I.C.
- Eversley, Lord (1910). Commons, Forests and Footpaths: the Story of the Battle during the last Forty-five Years for Public Rights over the Commons, Forests and Footpaths of England and Wales. London: Cassell and Company
- Mitchell, Vic and Smith, Keith (1995). Branch Line to Padstow. Midhurst: Middleton Press