THE SAWLES
By the time of his death in 1823, Rashleigh had been declared bankrupt and his estates sold off. Menacuddle was purchased by the Sawle family of Penrice and the pleasure grounds leased to the Martin family. Martin clearly cared for the site. In 1875 he led visiting members of the Royal Institution of Cornwall on a guided tour:
"We strolled through the grounds to visit the ancient holy well of Menacuddle. Pleasant indeed this stroll was. Rhododendrons and ferns flourish on every hand in the richest luxuriance, the turf is like a perfect velvet, and the trees verdant exceedingly. Menacuddle Well or Baptistry, as it is sometimes called, is a low, rude granite structure with a ribbed roof, built over a natural spring of pure water. It appears to date from somewhere about the Late Decorated period."
If this dating is correct, it suggests that the well-house dates from the second half of the 14thcentury when it came fully under the control of Tywardreath Priory.
By the early 20thcentury the “pleasure grounds” had reverted to the direct ownership of the Sawles. The family suffered a grievous loss when the son and heir Lieutenant Richard Graves-Sawle (aged 26) was killed during the opening skirmishes of the First World War. In 1921 his father, Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Graves-Sawle, gave the baptistry and the surrounding grounds to the parish of St Austell in his son’s memory.
When the Graves family became joined to the Sawle line through marriage they brought with them a long military tradition. Richard’s father, Sir Charles, became a Rear Admiral and his uncle, Sir Francis Aylmer Graves Sawle, had been Colonel of the 2ndBattalion Coldstream Guards. It was his uncle’s regiment that Richard chose to join after graduating from Sandhurst in 1907.
On November 2nd Richard Graves-Sawle was in a communications trench only 80 yards from a German position when he was forced to climb out to make way for an influx of French soldiers. He was hit in the head by a sniper and died two hours later. A stretcher-bearer wrote: “We did everything in our power to bring him back to life, as we loved him so much, and he was an example to us all of the most wonderful bravery and unselfishness”.
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