Slated Hotel and Casino Resort

About the informational pages for the Slated Hotel and Casino Resort, and the Trust that keeps Ravens Hollow House Hotel and Casino Resort.

Why these pages exist

Ravens Hollow House Hotel and Casino Resort was raised in 1768 in dressed Cornish slate over rubble-stone, on a wooded shoulder above a tidal cove on the north Cornish coast, as the residence of a Boscastle ship-master and the grading shed of the workings he kept above the cliff. The slate workings were quarried for two hundred and twenty-six years before the rope-haul gave way in 1947 and the upper terrace fell into the cliff; the house stood quiet through the post-war years and was held briefly as a temperance mission in the late 1940s and 1950s. The building passed into the keeping of the present Trust in October 1962 and has been operated continuously as a coastal house hotel since the spring of 1963. The hotel has twenty-four rooms across two ranges, with one restored slate-setting workshop on the lower-ground floor — the room our long guests refer to as the casino resort floor. These pages are the Trust’s own description of the hotel and casino resort, written for those who would like to know what they are walking into before they arrive.

We have not commissioned a copywriter, hired a marketing firm, or had the pages tuned for performance. The hotel is small, and the description is small with it. Each page is written by the duty manager and reviewed by a member of the Trust; the date of last review is recorded at the foot of each page in the manner of a country log.

The Ravens Hollow Trust

The Trust was registered in October 1962 by two of the ship-master’s descendants and a Boscastle solicitor with a single object: to hold the house, keep it in honest repair, and run it as a coastal house hotel for as long as the building stands without alteration of character. The Trust is constituted as a charitable company in England; its accounts are filed annually in Companies House and the Charity Commission register; its trustees take no remuneration for their offices and hold no commercial interest in the hotel’s takings.

The casino resort floor was restored from the Trust’s own drawings between 2014 and 2016. The room is presented and described as a feature of the property — a working slate-setting workshop returned to its 1768 finish — and is not held out as a gambling venue. The hotel takes no wagers, holds no player accounts, and receives no commission from any operator. The standing instructions for conduct on the casino resort floor are written and posted at the head of the staircase, and re-read by the duty manager at the start of each evening service.

How these pages are kept

These informational pages are reviewed in October each year, in the month the Trust was first registered. Where a fact has changed — a room added, a service moved, a rate altered — the change is logged in the Trust papers and the page amended in the same week. Where a fact is no longer current, the page is taken down rather than left to mislead. The pages do not carry advertising, do not link to gambling operators, and do not place tracking pixels for marketing purposes; the analytics we keep are the ordinary visitor counts of a small hotel website, used for nothing more than estimating how many people are reading.

The text and the line drawings of the house are kept by the Trust and may be quoted in short for reference or review. The text is not a marketing document; it is the description of a building, and the duty manager would prefer it to read that way. If you find a sentence that does not, please write to her at the address on the contact page.

Those whose names sit at the foot

Chair

Prudence Trevean — great-great-niece of the original ship-master; trustee since 2003, chair since 2019

Treasurer

Mark Halsey — retired solicitor of Truro; trustee since 2011

Building trustee

Eleanor Casbon — coastal-conservation architect; trustee since 2015; led the Setting Room restoration in 2016

House trustee

Tom Pengelly — former duty manager, 2002–2017; trustee since 2018

Independent trustee

The Honourable Margery Lanyon — appointed 2023 to a single five-year term

Duty manager

Rosalind Whitethorne — in post since the spring of 2018

The trustees meet four times a year in the library, and once at the close of October to sign the year’s description before it is published.