Jamaica Inn

Built in the mid eighteenth century, Jamaica Inn was a coaching inn. Weary travellers using the turnpike (road) between Launceston and Bodmin would stay at the Inn after having crossed the wild and treacherous moor. Some of the travellers were a little less respectable than most and used the Inn to hide away the contraband that had been smuggled ashore.

Ghost stories abound at Jamaica Inn! I have only spent the night there once and saw no ghosts but anything placed on the bedside table would almost immediately fall off! This may have been due to the old floors rather than any paranormal activity.

A short distance from Jamaica Inn is Dozmary Pool which is supposed to be the body of water inhabited by the 'lady of the lake' and into which Excalibur was thrown when King Arthur was killed.

On a cold and eerie night in 1930, writer Daphne du Maurier stayed at Jamaica Inn on the windswept moorlands of Bodmin. The atmosphere and legendary history of the Inn inspired her to write her most famous and compelling novel which was dramatised in 1936 by Alfred Hitchcock and starred Maureen O'Hara and then again in 1982 when it starred Jane Seymour.

The story tells the tale of Mary, an orphan who goes to live with her Aunt Patience and Uncle Joss Merlyn, the terrifying landlord of Jamaica Inn and the mystery surrounding her uncles's business - smuggling along the Cornish coast.

The grey slate inn, with its tall chimneys, forbidding and unihabited though it seemed, was the only dwelling-place on the landscape. To the west of Jamaica high tors reared their heads; some were smooth like downland, and the grass shone yellow under the fitful winter sun; but others were sinister and austere, their peaks crowned with granite and great slabs of stone.

Strange winds blew from nowhere; they crept along the surface of the grass, and the grass shivered; they breathed upon the little pools of rain in the hollowed stones, and the pools rippled. Sometimes the wind shouted and cried, and the cry echoed in the crevices, and moaned, and was lost again. There was a silence on the tors that belonged to another age; an age that is past and vanished as though it had never been, an age when man did not exist, but pagan footsteps trod upon the hills. And there was a stillness in the air, and a stranger, older peace, that was not the peace of God.