The Window in Duke Street

The Life and Folklore of Nellie Sloggett, Known as Enys Tregarthen

Illustration from the cover of Enys Tregarthen's most famous book - Legends and Tales of North Cornwall

Beginnings in Padstow

Padstow in the mid-nineteenth century was a town of tides and industry. Nets drying in the wind, the smell of pitch and tar, the shuffle of boots on cobbles. From the harbour, ships sailed out toward the Atlantic, carrying Cornish men into uncertain weather and distant seas. It was here, on 29 December 1851, that Ellen “Nellie” Sloggett was born to Moses and Sarah Sloggett.

Her father was a mariner, often gone for months at a time. Her mother, Sarah, kept house in Duke Street and raised their only child in a community where absence was expected and the sea was both neighbour and threat. The rhythm of departures and returns bound Padstow’s families together. When a man was at sea, the women kept watch, sewing, trading, gossiping, and waiting for the next sail to appear at the mouth of the Camel estuary.

Nellie’s early years would have been much like any child’s in a small Cornish port, yet she was already surrounded by story. The lanes of Padstow carried tales as easily as seagulls will steal an unguarded pasty: the ghost ships seen near Stepper Point, the saints who had walked the cliffs, the little folk said to dance near Prideaux Place. In that world, folklore was not something apart from life; it was part of it.

The Illness

When Nellie was seventeen, her life changed forever. She suffered a spinal illness that left her paralysed from the waist down. The cause was never fully recorded; what mattered was the result. From that point forward, she would spend her life confined largely to a bed or chair, with her world reduced to the view from a window.

Many might have faded in such circumstances, but Nellie turned inward and began to observe. From her window she recorded the changing light on the estuary, the arrival of spring flowers, the birds that came to her sill. Her diaries were careful and detailed, alive with curiosity. In time, those diaries became stories, and those stories found their way into print.

It is one of the quiet marvels of Cornish history that a woman who could not leave her room became one of the region’s great chroniclers of imagination.

The Writer Emerges

Her first published work, Daddy Longlegs and His White Heath Flower, appeared in 1885 under the name Nellie Cornwall. The book told a moral story set in nature, typical of late Victorian literature for children, but already there was something distinct about her writing. It was gentle, observant, and rooted in place.

Her next works followed quickly: Granny Tresawna’s Story (1886), Tamsin Rosewarne and Her Burdens (1892), and The Maid of the Storm (1900). These were stories of faith, endurance, and redemption, often featuring Cornish settings and dialect. She explained the meanings of local expressions in her notes, ensuring that readers beyond Cornwall could share in the flavour of the language.

As Nellie Cornwall, she was writing within a clear literary tradition: moral tales for young readers. Yet her work had warmth that set it apart. She wrote of working people with affection and of hardship with dignity. Though her themes were Christian, her sense of justice and kindness owed as much to Cornish community life as to scripture.

She never married and never left her mother’s side. Together they lived quietly, moving between small houses in Padstow, always within reach of the sea.

A Room and a Window

By the time she reached her fifties, Nellie’s room had become her world. Her cousins, particularly Alice and Lavinia Rawle, helped care for her. The Rawle family owned Padstow’s largest shipyard and were among the town’s leading employers. That prosperity gave Nellie the freedom to focus entirely on her writing.

It was from her window in Duke Street and later in Dennis Road that she watched the town change. Children grew up, ships came and went, and yet the old tales remained. Padstow remained a place where belief in the Piskey folk was still alive, and the older women of the town still swapped stories of the little people who lived beneath the hedges or in the hollows of the moors.

These stories began to draw her attention. Perhaps it was the boundary between her own life and the world outside, her physical confinement and her limitless imagination, that brought her close to these half-seen beings. The Piskies were watchers too, creatures on the edge of sight.

Becoming Enys Tregarthen

Around the turn of the century, Nellie changed her pen name. She began publishing as Enys Tregarthen, a name that sounded as if it had been lifted straight from a Cornish legend. It means “island of the homestead” in old Cornish, a choice that reflected both her isolation and her rootedness.

Her new focus was folklore. Between 1905 and 1911 she published three major collections:

• The Piskey Purse: Legends and Tales of North Cornwall (1905)

• North Cornwall Fairies and Legends (1906)

• The House of the Sleeping Winds and Other Stories (1911)

In these volumes, she gave voice to the traditional tales of her region. Her stories were not dry transcriptions; they were living narratives shaped by her ear for dialogue and her sympathy for rural life.

From The Piskey Purse:

“They be queer little bodies, the Piskeys, and they do make sport of the folk who come their way, yet they mean no harm if you keep a civil tongue and leave them their due.”

Her Piskies were mischievous but moral. They punished greed and rewarded humility. She described travellers led astray by fairy lights, children who stumbled into the otherworld, and fishermen who found their luck turned by unseen hands.

In my humble opinion, Nellie’s stories did more than preserve folklore; they humanised it. She gave faces and feelings to the old beliefs, allowing readers to step into the fields and lanes of Cornwall’s mythic landscape.

The Folklorist in Her Room

Scholars would later argue about how much of Enys Tregarthen’s work was genuine folklore and how much was invention. It is true that she did not always record her sources. Yet to dwell on that is to miss the heart of her achievement.

From her bed, she created a vision of Cornwall that balanced the real and the imagined. Her Piskies may have been partly hers, but they carried echoes of older voices. Many of her tales match patterns found elsewhere in Cornish tradition: the Piskey-led traveller, the changeling child, the fairy midwife.

In North Cornwall Fairies and Legends, she writes of a fisherman’s wife who leaves out cream each night for the Piskies and one day forgets:

“And from that time, the nets came home empty, and no song of the sea sounded sweet to her ears again.”

It is simple, but it captures a worldview where generosity, respect, and balance with nature mattered more than wealth or reason.

A Voice in the Cornish Revival

The early twentieth century saw a renewed interest in Celtic identity. Across Cornwall, writers, historians, and artists were reclaiming the county’s distinct heritage. Tregarthen’s books appeared at the same time as works by Henry Jenner and others who were reviving the Cornish language.

Her House of the Sleeping Winds was dedicated to the Bishop of Truro and prefaced by historian Thurstan Peter. It was beautifully produced, with coloured illustrations in the Art Nouveau style. Among its readers was a young John Betjeman, who would later write affectionately of it in verse, remembering it as a comfort to a friend who was unwell.

Through her work, Nellie joined the cultural conversation that defined modern Cornwall. She gave the north coast its myths in print, just as Bottrell had done for the far west a generation earlier.

The Last Years

By 1911, Nellie had moved to stay with her cousin Lavinia in Little Petherick. Later, she lived at 32 Dennis Road in Padstow, in the home of her cousin Alice Rawle. There she spent her final years, still writing, still collecting stories, and corresponding with friends.

Nellie's final home on Dennis Road, in Padstow

She died in late 1923, aged seventy-two. Her mother, Sarah, had died before her, and the two were buried together beneath a simple cross in Padstow cemetery. Not far from their grave stands a grander monument to another branch of the Sloggett family, but it is Nellie’s modest stone that carries the greater story.

The American Connection

For years after her death, her papers remained in a trunk at Dennis Road. Then, in 1938, an American writer named Elizabeth Yates visited Padstow. She met “Miss R”, almost certainly Alice Rawle, who showed her Nellie’s room and the manuscripts she had left behind. Yates was deeply moved.

She took some of the manuscripts back to America and edited them for publication. Through her, three new books appeared: Piskey Folk: A Book of Cornish Legends (1940), The Doll Who Came Alive (1942), and The White Ring (1949). These works introduced Enys Tregarthen to new audiences and ensured that her stories did not vanish with her passing.

Yates later wrote, “Strange as it may seem in these matter-of-fact times, there are people living who not only hold that there are Piskeys, but say they have actually seen them.” Her words echoed Tregarthen’s own conviction that folklore was not a relic but a living truth carried in the hearts of ordinary people.

The Forgotten Folklorist

Despite her output, Tregarthen was long overlooked by scholars. The folklorists of the twentieth century favoured those who documented their informants with scientific precision. Her blend of fiction and tradition did not fit their methods.

It was not until the work of Simon Young in the twenty-first century that her reputation began to be restored. In his article Her Room Was Her World, he argued that she deserves to be considered alongside Bottrell and Hunt as one of the key recorders of Cornish folklore.

Young pointed out that while she fictionalised her tales, she preserved themes and motifs that might otherwise have been lost. Her stories are full of local place names and dialect, giving invaluable glimpses of the oral culture of North Cornwall.

More than that, her writing embodies a distinctly Cornish sensibility: independence, reverence for nature, and humour in the face of hardship.

The Piskey World

To read Tregarthen today is to step into a world that sits just beyond the hedgerows of modern life. Her fairies are not the delicate sprites of Victorian illustration but small country people, sometimes kindly, sometimes cross. They bake bread in tiny ovens, mend shoes at night, and lead travellers astray for the fun of it.

From The House of the Sleeping Winds:

“There are places where the air itself remembers. On still nights, when the sea breathes quiet, you may hear the whisper of wings and the patter of small feet, like rain upon heather.”

Such lines remind us that folklore is not about belief alone. It is about the texture of memory. Nellie’s Piskies live on because they were drawn from a culture that understood story as inheritance.

Legacy

Today, few visitors to Padstow know of Nellie Sloggett. Her books are hard to find, though a few of her tales survive in small reprints such as Padstow’s Faery Folk. Yet her influence lingers. Each time a child in Cornwall is told to beware of being Piskey-led, or someone leaves a saucer of milk on a step, they echo the world she helped to preserve.

Her story is also one of quiet courage. From a single room, with no formal education and little opportunity, she created a body of work that bridged faith, folklore, and imagination. She turned limitation into insight, isolation into connection.

Reflection

Standing on the quay at Padstow, it is easy to picture her looking out from her window a century ago, watching the same tides. The masts she saw are gone, replaced by yachts and ferries, but the hills beyond the estuary remain. The same gulls wheel above the same currents. Somewhere in that view lies the seed of her stories.

Her life reminds us that folklore is not only carried by those who travel and collect. It can also be gathered by those who stay still, who listen, who observe. Her window became a lens through which she saw the soul of her home.

If her Piskies are remembered, it is because she wrote of them with affection, not distance. She believed that wonder could coexist with reason, that faith and folklore were not opposites but companions.

Conclusion

Enys Tregarthen’s Cornwall was one of small miracles and moral truths, of beauty found in endurance. She once wrote, “There be many who say the Piskeys are gone, but they are only gone from those who will not see.”

Perhaps that is the lesson she leaves us. To look closely. To listen to old voices. To believe that the unseen world of story and spirit still lingers in the hedges, the moors, and the sea mist of Cornwall.

And perhaps, when the tide turns quiet at evening, the Piskeys of Padstow still dance, carrying with them the memory of a woman who turned her window into a doorway between worlds.