A house without electricity
Near-intact Tudor rooms seen by window light alone, hung with seventeenth-century tapestries, armour and early oak.
There is no electric light in this house. Come to Cotehele on an overcast day and you feel your way between granite walls hung with seventeenth-century tapestries, armour glinting in whatever light the small windows let in, much as visitors saw it centuries ago. That is what makes it close to unique in Britain: the Edgcumbe family built it around inner courtyards between 1485 and about 1560, then made Mount Edgcumbe, at the mouth of the Tamar facing Plymouth, their principal seat and left the old house standing as a second home. Nobody modernised it, nobody ran the wiring; from the eighteenth century the family went further and kept it deliberately ancient, sending furnishings they no longer wanted up the river so it would read as an ancestral seat. What survives is a near-intact Tudor home with early oak furniture and a cavernous kitchen, and the feeling of having slipped into a history play after the lights went out. The house itself takes an hour. Then comes the part that justifies the drive: terraced gardens fall away above the Tamar valley, past a medieval dovecote and stewpond, down to a Victorian quay where the Shamrock, the last of the sailing barges that once worked the river and built in Plymouth in 1899, sits restored, with a watermill on the Morden stream repaired and turning again a short walk up its wooded side valley. The full loop from house to quay to mill wants three hours at the very least with a break in the middle, and the climb back up from the river is a real one, so an all-terrain mobility scooter can be booked in advance for anyone who would rather not face it. The annual event is a different creature. From late November into the first days of January the Great Hall is hung with the Christmas Garland, a rope of dried flowers about eighteen metres long, more than twenty thousand of them grown, picked and dried by the garden team through the summer, a tradition going back to the 1950s that pulls visitors from across the West Country and beyond. The catch: the rest of the house shuts for those weeks, leaving only the hall, the kitchen and a couple of rooms, and the whole house closes from early January to early March, while the gardens and quay stay open all year. For families, the gardens, quay and mill make an excellent outing with children, and a buggy-friendly route covers most of that ground, but inside the house the corridors are narrow, the stone stairs are steep and the rooms are dim, so it suits neither prams nor anyone uneasy in the dark. By car it is about 25 minutes from Plymouth over the Tamar Bridge and around an hour and a quarter from Truro, the last stretch on very narrow lanes; parking is charged unless you are a National Trust member. The pretty alternative is the Tamar Valley Line train from Plymouth to Calstock, then a 1.5 km walk. Members enter free; non-members pay £18 per adult.
Near-intact Tudor rooms seen by window light alone, hung with seventeenth-century tapestries, armour and early oak.
Terraced gardens drop to the Tamar, where the sailing barge Shamrock is moored and a restored watermill turns again on the Morden stream.
A rope of dried flowers about eighteen metres long fills the Great Hall from late November to early January.
St Dominick, near Saltash, PL12 6TA
Not if you are based in the far west around St Ives or Newquay: it is close to two hours each way on narrow lanes, and National Trust houses like Lanhydrock sit closer to you. If you are entering Cornwall from Plymouth or staying near Saltash or Liskeard, it is one of the finest things in the east of the county and pairs easily with Plymouth in a single day.
The gardens, quay and mill do, and a buggy-friendly route links most of them. The house does not: narrow corridors, steep stone stairs and dim rooms mean parents are better off taking turns inside while the little ones stay with the gardens and the river.