A BEQUEST made by a clergyman who died in 1994 has helped the National Trust to buy a dramatic stretch of the Cornish coast near Mevagissey, where he ministered for almost 30 years and which he finally made his home.

The late the Revd Anthony Mapplebeck, who was born in 1916 and retired in 1981, left the sum of £50,000 and the residue of his estate to the National Trust’s Neptune Coastline Campaign, launched in the 1960s to protect and care for the coastline for the benefit of people and nature. He also left bequests to both Veryan and Mevagissey churches.

He wanted specifically to protect this region of the coastal path, and the Trust has waited for an opportunity to spend the bequest precisely as he wished. It came when the Council of Cornwall put Alldays Field up for sale: a 13.66-hectare site equivalent to about 19 football pitches, and a critical link to the South West Coastal Path, which runs along the southern edge of the field.

Land on three sides is already owned by the Trust, which is rejoicing in the opportunity to join up habitats, strengthen wildlife corridors, and ensure uninterrupted access to this stretch of coastline.

Mr Mapplebeck is considered something of an enigma. He was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and trained for the priesthood at Cuddesdon. He served his title during the war at Holy Cross, Greenford, in the diocese of London, before serving a second curacy in Bodmin from 1945 to 1949, when he became Vicar of St Veryan. He was then Vicar of Mevagissey from 1955 until his retirement.

Jenefer Keast, who was in his congregation with her family, remembers him “gliding up the church path in his long, black clerical cloak”. She cannot imagine him striding out with a rucksack. “He wasn’t known for that. He had a serious, scholarly face, with a great air of reserve about him,” she said on Wednesday. “You wouldn’t have seen him on the quay chatting to the fishermen. If he did walk, it would have been alone, communing with himself.

“He used to go on holiday once a year with some of his Cambridge friends, and went out with a neighbour sometimes to visit National Trust properties. His mother and sister lived with him until he retired to a cottage in Mevagissey, gifted to him by a parishioner. The study was very much his domain.”

Andy Simmons, National Trust area ranger for south-east Cornwall, said: “It feels especially fitting that this land was secured thanks to someone who dedicated his life to serving Cornish communities and who loved walking the coastal paths himself.”