In a corner of Pennycross just north of Outland Road and south-west from the Parkway are a number of Cornish flavoured street names, some of them, apparently, named after places so small that they don’t figure on most maps of that most westerly of English counties, and Trevessa is one of them. There is a Trevessa in Penwith, and quite literally it means the lowest of the neighbouring farms or homestead and while the homestead or farm element is very common in Cornwall, if not the most frequently occurring place-name element in that county, the second part appears in a number of spellings, hence we have Trevis, Trevissa, Trevessa and seemingly Trevegia too.
Interestingly enough, according to Caxton, John Trevisa, a contemporary of Chaucer, translated the Bible into English. In 1923, not that long before this area of Plymouth was created, an SS Trevessa sank in the Indian Ocean, and rather famously one of its lifeboats survived after 26 days at sea, although one member of the weakened group died soon after being carried ashore. The following year, it would appear that the name Trevessa was immortalised again, this time in the naming of a plant bug Trevessa Albidopicta.
