Cornwall possesses very few stately houses. At the close of the seventeenth century a schoolmaster at Trebartha filled a folio with sketches of the ancient manor-houses of the neighbourhood of the Tamar; picturesque old mansions of the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Nearly every one has disappeared. The squirearchy of Cornwall, flush of money, through tin, pulled down their old residences and built mansions in the Georgian period, totally devoid of interest. Of the old houses few remain except as farm houses. They were, however, never so magnificent as those in the counties where bricks and easily dressed stone existed. But still there remain Cothele, unaltered, the beautiful house of Lord Mount Edgcumbe on the Tamar; Basil, the manor-house of the Trevelyans, much mutilated by the barbarous hand of a modern architect; Trecarrel, near Launceston, an old Tudor mansion with a noble hall, never completed; Place, near Padstow, formerly Prideaux Castle, the Elizabethan residence of the Prideaux Brunes, very stately, and with a dining room rich in carved oak; Lanherne, built in 1580, a small manor-house of the Arundells and now a convent; Lanhydrock, built by the first Lord Roberts--they called themselves later Robartes; Place House, Fowey, with rich sculpture; Trerice, the old seat of the Arundells; Tregudick with its Elizabethan hall; Penheale, once the seat of the Speccots, in Egloskerry; Tonacombe, an unaltered house of the reign of Henry VII, in Morwenstow; Penfound in Poundstock, small but charming; and Lanreath, with a carved oak parlour, the ancient house of the Grylls family. There are others, now farmhouses, and only spared on that account, deserted when the squires moved elsewhere and did not pull down their ancestral residences. [Illustration: Cothele] A monastic building consisted of a church, with a cloister court adjoining, about which were the dormitories, a library, and a refectory or room in which all had their meals in common. There would be often two courts, one outer, the other with the cloister about it in which the monks mainly lived and in the centre of which was the monastic graveyard. The garden of pot herbs and herbs for medicinal purposes was an essential feature of all monastic settlements, as was also the stewpond or ponds for fish. The necessity under which the monks lay of being near water, both for their fish and for sanitary purposes and for drinking, led to all monastic establishments lying low down in valleys by running streams.