Caerhays Castle

In the Early Middle Ages the manor belonged to the Arundell family. Its name is first recorded as Karihaes in 1259 and appears as Carihays in 1379, though the original meaning is obscure. In about 1379 the manor passed by marriage to the Trevanion family, after Robert Trevanion married Johanna Arundell, daughter and heiress of Rudolph Arundell of Caerhays. John Trevanion inherited in 1703, improved the manor house then standing on the site and developed gardens there. With the death of William Trevanion in 1767 the estate passed to his sister's son, John Bettesworth.

John Bettesworth's son, John Bettesworth-Trevanion, built the present castle between 1807 and 1810 on a site close to the former manor house, half a mile south of St Michael Caerhays and looking out over Porthluney Cove on the English Channel; his architect was the Anglo-Welsh John Nash. The original home near whose site it stood had itself been enlarged during the reign of King Henry VIII. The result is semi-castellated, its exterior bearing the appearance of a Norman castle and built of rough stone quarried from the immediate neighbourhood, with an entrance front 160 feet long facing south from an embattled terrace.

Bettesworth-Trevanion afterwards left for Paris, unable to pay his bills. Michael Williams II purchased Caerhays from his creditors in 1854, by which time the house had stood unoccupied for over a decade and had not been watertight for some of that time.

Michael Williams II's younger brother, Sir William Williams, 1st Baronet, of Tregullow (1791–1870), together with John Michael Williams (1813–1880), initiated an extensive repair programme. Michael Williams II died in 1858 and left Caerhays to his eldest son, that same John Michael Williams, while Scorrier House went to his sixth son George Williams (1827–1891), High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1875.

When John Michael Williams died in 1880 the estate went to his second son, John Charles Williams (1861–1939), then aged 18; the elder brother, Michael Williams (1857–1899) of Gnaton Hall, died without progeny. John Charles Williams married in 1884, at which time the house went through another round of restoration and alteration. He became a plantsman and sponsored plant-hunting expeditions in order to fill the castle garden with new acquisitions. Seeds brought back from China by Ernest Henry Wilson in 1903 were donated to him by Harry Veitch, and by 1917 the garden held over 250 types of rhododendron.

Parts of the original manor survive on the estate, among them the ancient chapel and an old walkway down to the sea that still carries the name of the Watchhouse Walk. The castle became a Grade I listed building on 15 November 1988, and the garden wall with its gateways and folly tower, the Higher Lodge, the Lower Lodge with its screen walls and the service buildings to the south-west are Grade I listed in their own right; the park and garden were registered Grade II* on 11 June 1987. The house holds an important mineral collection, much of it from the Williams family's Cornish mines and some of it obtained by purchase.

The garden covers almost 120 acres, traversed by four named routes, and holds 600 varieties of plant including azaleas and camellias; its magnolias are accredited with Plant Heritage under the National Plant Collection scheme. Caerhays provided the exterior shots for the 1979 television adaptation of Rebecca, and filming for Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children ran for three months on the estate and at Porthluney Cove in 2015. It appears in the later Poldark novels, where Ross and Demelza Poldark's son Jeremy meets a love interest at Caerhays and which stress both the magnificence of the castle and the ruinous cost to the Trevanions of rebuilding it. The owner as of 2023 was Charles Williams.