The Old Post Office - Tintagel, Cornwall (NT)
When the postage stamp was introduced in 1840 by Sir Rowland Hill, the volume of post increased substantially, and the small hamlet of Tintagel, then known as Trevena, was chosen to serve the surrounding area as a Post Office. The then owner of the old manor house let a room to the Post Office, and although this arrangement ceased in 1892, the manor house is still known as the Old Post House.
The building dates from the fourteenth century, and is a rare example of its kind in this part of Britain. The entrance porch from the main street leads into a passage, with a stone bench on either side.This is very much like the screens passage to be seen in larger domestic buildings from the time. The passage has a door on either side, leading to the Hall and the Parlour, and it opens at the end into what is now a delightfully peaceful garden. As illustrated above, from the garden you can see the two massive buttresses, added some time after the house was built to support the walls. You can also see the round 'tower' containing the stairs.
The plan is very simple; the Hall rises through both stories and there is a large slate lintel over the fireplace; the Parlour may have originally been the kitchen, although there are ovens to the side of the fireplaces in both the Hall and what came to be the Post Room. In the Parlour are two Windsor chairs and some samplers, girl's embroideries, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.The two bedrooms are on either wing of the house, reached by separate stairs from the Hall and the Parlour. Off the North Bedroom, above the Parlour, is a gallery, probably a third bedroom, and the slate stairs to reach it are embedded into the wall, making access quite tricky for larger people. Below the South Bedroom is the Post Room, equipped as a Victorian village post office. The telegraph had reached this remote spot by 1890. The small National Trust shop is now in this atmospheric room.
In the late nineteenth century, Tintagel changed its character as a result of the popularity engendered by the poems of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne. The legends of King Arthur and Tristram and Iseult made the place a Romantic point of pilgrimage. Many of the old buildings in the village were torn down, but the Post Office was saved. It was purchased by the National Trust in 1900 and it underwent conservation in 1992, when the roof beams were found to be rotten. The original slate roof tiles, so heavy they had bent the roof-line, were replaced onto the new beams, so the building stayed substantially the same.