Cobb Cottage is one of the oldest buildings in Trebetherick. The original cottage, as seen from the lane, is uppermost, the rest having been added on in the last thirty years. It was a two-up two-down cottage, the last in a row of six built probably about 1780. In 1840 Nancy Kent was living in Cobb Cottage – a nearby field is known still as Nancy’s Meadow. The other five cottages were then occupied by William Mably, Robert Mably, Aaron Slogett and John Kent. William Mably also had the ‘apparatus house’, where the rocket cart was kept for the lifeboat.
By 1880 the Ordnance Survey map shows only one of the row of cottages left – Cobb Cottage – but nothing is known of what happened to the other five. Neglect can quickly lead to the breakdown of the material ‘cob’, which is quite simply mud, sand and rubble stone, mainly mud on the upper storey. Obviously the cottage acquired its name from this material, but why two Bs is open to discussion!
Next door a house known as St Enodoc Cottage was built in 1826 and is here today, unchanged. It was built, we believe, by Theophilus Hoskin, and was occupied in the early 1900s by Captain Faulkner – information given to us by John Betjeman and since verified from the Parish Register. Cobb Cottage seems to have been tied to St Enodoc Cottage either as a gardener’s cottage or an annexe, as it was when we purchased Cobb in 1977.
The garden at Cobb Cottage retains a lot of the old character, with its apple trees. John Betjeman told us that the first German spy to be captured during the First World War was arrested there after local people reported having seen smoke rising from the chimney of the unoccupied cottage; he had come off a submarine in Daymer Bay.
