GARTUL – written in Feb 2021 by Andrew BELL:
We know very little about the history of the house because there are no deeds. As “Seaview Cottage” it was long part of the Coode Estate West.
In 1999 when the front wall was being resurfaced the initials “EC 1806” were revealed on the lintel over the Dining Room window: edward is a common name in the Coode family’s history. In 1990 when the house was being entirely re-roofed, parts of a rainwater collection duct were found: this feature often dates from the 1700s.
Geoff Miller (founder of Millerson) identified a “spine wall” between the Entrance Hall and the Dining Room. This feature is a very old way of holding up the central part of the centre line of a roof which it no longer does.
The first lease on Gartul dates from 1917 in the name of my maternal grandfather George H. SMITH.
It was he who changed the name. It should have been “Car-tol” meaning a hole under a rock of which there is one on Great Trigg Reefer below the house. He retired in the 1920s to the house and died in it in 1936. Since then four successive generations of the family have lived in it and bought it privately in 1989.
My mother, Kay BELL (1897-1988), thought that it had been used by successive chief engineers building the Harbour. I suspect that she heard this from elderly fishermen when she was a young girl. We do know that the three rows of terraced cottages on the area now occupied by Trigg House and Porth House were used to house workers building the Harbour.In the autumn of 2019 we were advised that work had been completed in the Cornwall records new office at Redruth in cataloguing some of the Coode Estate Archives. We were about to make arrangements to search through these in early 2020 when the Records Office “Closed for the Duration”.
Porthleven Museum 