A visit to Jamaica Inn

I have been a fan of Daphne du Maurier for several years after my friend Laura encouraged me to read Rebecca, especially since that is also my name! We then saw it at the theatre and it was excellent. I read Jamaica Inn and enjoyed that, too, and I recently watched the dramatisation starring Jessica Brown Findlay and thought it was good. 

I hadn't realised that Jamaica Inn was a real place, but as I was looking through the tourist leaflets in our holiday cottage I saw a leaflet for it and knew we had to go! It is in the middle of Bodmin Moor and these days the dual carriageway bypasses the road it sits on, but you go on the old road to get to the inn and it is a narrow and windswept road. 

The inn still functions as such and has several hotel rooms - how amazing would it be to stay there! There's also a huge bar, a restaurant with carvery, a gift shop, and a museum. We paid to go into it and although it wasn't huge it was good fun. 

The sign, with Joss Merlyn brooding down from it

The inn itself; it was always this L shape apparently

du Maurier's writing desk and her typewriter

A signed copy of The House on the Strand

More signatures 

A playbill of Rebecca

Half of the museum is about du Maurier and her life and works, and half is about smuggling

I loved this old chest!

Lee hadn't realised that du Maurier wrote the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now, which were made into two of his favourite films, so in the gift shop we bought an anthology of the short stories to read, and I also bought My Cousin Rachel and another copy of Jamaica Inn as I don't know where mine went!