Place
Restoration of Hall Roof – PCM Pinwill Collection (PLMG.1942.5.5.1-10); date unknown
Immediately next to the parish church in Fowey lies Place, a building first recorded in 1457 and reconstructed between 1813 and 1845 in an exuberant Romantic Gothic style (Beacham & Pevsner, 2014). The main staircase is decorated with ‘a riot of monsters and beasts… with serpents coiling around tree trunks, angular dolphins forming the balusters, and toads and crabs facing up to each other’ (Ibid. p. 203). The ten pieces of carving labelled as being from Place in Plymouth City Museum’s Pinwill collection are Gothic in style and include an acanthus leaf labelled ‘Hall Roof’. Investigations are under way to establish whether these pieces are in fact from the roof of the Hall (now the dining room).
Sources
Beacham, P. & Pevsner, N. (2014) The Buildings of England. Cornwall. Yale University Press, London.
PLMG.1942.5.5.1-10 Photographs of Carvings from Place, Fowey, Cornwall, held at Plymouth City Museum, donated by Violet Pinwill in 1942.