A few words must be devoted to the new Cathedral at Truro erected from the designs of the late Mr J.L. Pearson in a French Gothic style of architecture. It consists of a choir of five bays, with retrochoir, transepts, nave with north and south aisles, baptistery and south-west porch, richly sculptured; a central and two western towers. Attached to the south side of the choir is the fine old parish church of St Mary, or a portion of it. There is an elaborately sculptured reredos over the altar. Notwithstanding its faults Truro Cathedral is a notable monument of the enthusiasm and self-denial of the Cornish people.
Dupath Well, Callington
The Holy Wells of Cornwall are a distinct feature of the county. In all Celtic lands, previous to the introduction of Christianity, there was a great veneration for wells, and the early missionaries took advantage of this to turn them into baptisteries, or in other ways to consecrate them. Holy wells abound in Cornwall, but they have not always much architectural character. That of Dupath, by Liskeard, is the finest, but there is also another that is fine at St Cleer, and one most interesting and unique at St Clether, where, indeed, there are two, for the water from the first flows into a chapel and is carried under the old stone altar, to decant into another well outside the chapel. The Madron Holy Well was for long famous for cures.
22. Architecture: (b) Military—Castles.
Before the Norman Conquest there were no masonry built castles in Cornwall, only stockades of wood surmounting earthworks or piled up masses of stone uncemented. The usual Saxon Burh was a mound, surmounted by a structure of timber, reached by a bridge or ladder from a base-court that was encompassed by moat and mound and stockade. The Norman system of building a castle was to erect a round or square keep, a massive structure of stone, on the mound that had formerly been surmounted by a wooden structure, and to surround the base-court with a stone wall. Within this were erected the necessary domestic buildings. Very generally the entrance to the court was strongly defended by a second tower. The style of castle was greatly altered in the reign of Edward I but of such Edwardian castles there are no examples in Cornwall, save the poor fragment of Tintagel. The Normans built a castle at Launceston, and there the circular keep standing on a lofty tump of rock, artificially shaped, is of their construction, but the ruined buildings below, with the gateways and walls of the base-court, are later.
The castle of Trematon also consists of a "motte" surmounted by a circular keep, and a base-court with square tower at the entrance, with an archway.
Tintagel Castle is reduced to a miserable ruin, part on the mainland, part on the islet, with the intervening portion blocked up by fallen rocks, forming a narrow isthmus. The deep chasm that formerly separated the two portions of the castle was anciently spanned by a drawbridge. The work appears to be of the thirteenth century. On the island are the remains of a chapel with its altar slab still in place. Tintagel became a residence of the Earls of Cornwall, and in 1245, Richard son of King John received in it his nephew David, Prince of Wales. It was subsequently used occasionally as a prison. In the reign of Elizabeth, that penurious queen, deeming the expense of keeping it up too onerous, allowed it to fall into ruin.