Polharwith Arms

In the short story The Blood-Stained Pavement, Polharwith Arms is an old inn in the picturesque Cornish village of Rathole. Joyce Lemprière describes it as a "wonderful old place" with a kind of porch built on four pillars. The inn is supposedly the oldest building in the village being the only house left standing when Spanish troops attacked the place with cannons in the fifteen hundreds. Local legend also had it that the innkeeper was the last man to be killed. He had been run through on his own threshold by a Spanish captain's sword.

The inn forms part of the setting of a mystery narrated by Joyce Lemprière. She had gone to Rathole to paint and had set up a pitch just outside the inn. What she saw and what she inadvertantly painted forms the main plot of her story and ultimately tinged her painting with the same kind of atmosphere: a "smiling, bright, top part of it--and the hidden gruesomeness underneath."