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| The headstone erected to commemorate Dolly Pentreath, last known speaker of Cornish, lived and died in Mousehole. |
"The final demise of Cornish in the 18th century was rapid. By 1735 two local scholars, Gwavas and Tonkin, could find only a few speakers in the small fishing villages and coved between Penzance and Land's End, and it was in one of these,Mousehole,lived Dolly Pentreathy.......she died in 177 but nine years before her death she was visited by the antiquary Daines Barrington who noticed that there were still other folk in the village who understood her,but could not speak the language readily. Dolly's place in the history book was confirmed in 1860 when a bilingual tombstone in Paul churchyard was erected to her memory by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, a descendant of Napoleon and a keen antiquary.
A year before Dolly's death a sixty'five year old Mousehole fisherman called William Bodener wrote to Daines Barrington saying "there is not more than four or five in our town can talk Cornish now old people four-score years old . Cornish is all forgot with young people".
Information courtesy of Ian Soulsby
Lowena Mor
PZ 47