[1] In old age, she remembered that as a child she had sold fish at Penzance in the Cornish language, which most local inhabitants (even the gentry) then understood.

"[4] In 1768, Daines Barrington searched Cornwall for speakers of the language and at Mousehole found Pentreath, then a fish seller said to be aged about 82, who "could speak Cornish very fluently".

In 1775 he published an account of her in the Society of Antiquaries' journal Archaeologia in an article called "On the Expiration of the Cornish Language."

Barrington noted that the "hut in which she lived was in a narrow lane," and that in two rather better cottages just opposite it he had found two other women, some ten or twelve years younger than Pentreath, who could not speak Cornish readily, but who understood it.

Dolly Pentreath has passed into legend for cursing people in a long stream of fierce Cornish whenever she became angry.

She was at one time thought to have been identical with a Dorothy Jeffrey or Jeffery whose burial is recorded in the Paul parish register, but this has been doubted (however the Oxford DNB (2004) does accept the identification).

It read: Here lieth interred Dorothy Pentreath who died in 1777, said to have been the last person who conversed in the ancient Cornish, the peculiar language of this country from the earliest records till it expired in the eighteenth century, in this Parish of Saint Paul.

This stone is erected by the Prince Louis Bonaparte in Union with the Revd John Garret Vicar of St Paul, June 1860.

[8]Contradicting the monument, in 1882 Dr Frederick Jago of Plymouth received a letter from Bernard Victor, of Mousehole, who wrote "She died Decr.

"Dolly's actual resting place is 47 feet south-east, a point easterly from Prince L. L. Bonaparte's monument to her.

"[9] However, the erroneous idea that Pentreath had lived to be 102 is believed to originate in a Cornish language epitaph which had been written by December 1789 and published in 1806 by a man named Tomson.

[1] No burial of Dorothy Pentreath is recorded, but it has been argued that this appears in the parish register under the name of Dolly Jeffery, which is suggested to be the surname of her son's father.

He was the last known survivor of a number of traditional Cornish speakers of the 19th century including Jacob Care of St Ives (d. 1892); Elizabeth Vingoe of Higher Boswarva, Madron (d. 1903 and who taught at least some Cornish to her son); John Davey junior (d. 1891) and senior, of Boswednack; Anne Berryman (1766–1854), also of Boswednack.