A-Z Challenge 2017 - Houses, some real, some not - 'M'

M - Menabilly

Menabilly, The Seat of Rashleigh, Esq. Cornwall
(Antique print - in public domain)

I first went to Fowey in Cornwall in 2007. By chance our visit coincided with the Daphne du Maurier Festival celebrating her centenary.

The opening of Rebecca, possibly Daphne's most famous novel begins - 

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited."

That opening introduced Manderley, a forbidding house with an equally forbidding, black-clad Mrs Danvers as its housekeeper. The fictional Manderley was modelled on Milton House, near Peterborough the ancestral home of the Fitzwilliam family and the house and gardens of the Cornish Menabilly. 

Menabilly House, Fowey, Cornwall
(Created Jan 1, 1920 - in public domain)

Belonging to the Rashleigh family, Menabilly, became the home for Daphne and her husband from 1943 to 1969, its history and grounds also provided input to novels later than Rebecca.

The first novel she wrote at Menabilly was The King's General. Set during the English Civil war, it was prompted by the discovery, during alterations to Menabilly in the 1820s, of a walled-up skeleton thought to have been a Cavalier. It tells the story of the love between Richard Grenville, The King's General and Royalist Honor Harris, one of du Maurier's strongest heroines.

in 1969 the year she was made a DBE, the Rashleighs wanted to return to Menabilly; despite all the money she had spent on its restoration Daphne was forced to accept a move to its dower house, Kilmarth, where she was to live until her death.