Folly ID-ed

In the course of online debates about quirky holiday lettings a friend of mine answered a longstanding mystery. A couple of years ago I scanned all my parents' old slide photographs including ones from a holiday they took in Cornwall back in 1993. They included this:

I didn't recognise it and nobody from the family knew where it was - my Dad probably took the snap and since the whole point in scanning the photos was to provide him with an album to look at as he had Alzheimer's by that stage, there was no chance of him remembering. We thought it might be on Bodmin Moor given the photos taken either side of it, but I couldn't see anything on the map that matched.

It turns out the little folly is Doyden Castle, now owned by the National Trust and nowhere near Bodmin Moor at all, but perched close to the cliff near Port Isaac. Dad and my sister probably saw in when they went for a walk  one day without my Mum. Headley and Meulenkamp say it was built to commemorate the loss of the fishing boat from the hamlet of Portquin at the foot of the cliff, which went down with every man in the village drowned - but the National Trust's claim is that it was built by Samuel Symons of Wadebridge in about 1830 as a party venue, which seems much more likely. Samuel Symons certainly existed, and while there's a persistent story that Port Quin was 'the Village That Died' after it was abandoned some time in the 19th century when all the menfolk were lost at sea, that not only seems bizarre, but it's never dated and never documented, at least not in any place I can discover.