Farnham · Heritage · A walk through the village

A walk through
Farnham.

The houses and families of the village, told in the order one meets them walking in from Knaresborough — following the route mapped by Richard Bridger and the Farnham Historical Society in The Village of Farnham (1996).

In 1990 a group of Farnham residents formed an Historical Study Group; over six years they worked through the parish registers (continuous back to 1569), the census returns, the Land Tax Assessments, the Slingsby Papers in York, the Knaresborough Wills and the typewritten manuscript that the Rev. Anthony Waterer had left behind in 1956. The result was a small book, published locally in 1996, that walked the visitor through the village house by house and told what was known of each building and the people who had lived in it.

What follows is that walk — in nine stops, starting from the cross-roads where Farnham Lane comes in from Knaresborough, finishing at Stang Hall on the road north. Many of the buildings still stand. Some are gone, others much changed. All have stories.

The eighth stop on the original route — St Oswald’s Church — has been given its own page in the Heritage section, where its fifteen hundred year story can be told in its proper depth.

The walk

Stop One

Farnham Lane — in from Knaresborough.

The parish boundary is crossed soon after leaving the Boroughbridge Road. Gibbet Farm on the hill to the right was, until quite recently, just outside the parish — in Scriven — though its residents felt themselves part of Farnham and worshipped at St Oswald’s, and after considerable effort succeeded in having the parish boundary moved to include them. To the left of the farm a stretch of medieval land terracing is still visible on the hillside.

The ridge running east from here was marked on the 1854 Ordnance map as Gospel Balk, for the Gospel Tree once standing on the boundary at which the vicar paused to read scripture during the annual ceremony of beating the bounds. The highest point of the ridge is called Gibbet Hill, for the grimmer custom of tarring and chaining the bodies of executed wrongdoers and hanging them in a prominent position as a public warning.

Gibbet Cottage.

Where the woods meet the lane stands Gibbet Cottage, with a date-stone of FT · 1797 — built for Thomas and Fanny Hoadley. Throughout the nineteenth century it was known as Hodley House. The 1842 deed in the Slingsby Papers describes it as built “upon the wastes” on land for which an annual rent of fourteen shillings was paid to the Duke of Devonshire. The census returns from 1841 onwards show it used as two dwellings, often occupied by gamekeepers; in 1875 the tenant James Metcalf successfully prosecuted a poacher who chose fourteen days in prison rather than pay a ten-shilling fine.

The two lakes and the long quarry.

Across the road, on land that was once the prehistoric bed of an old river, lie the two lakes — reshaped by forty years of sand-and-gravel extraction. In 1956 the Rev. Waterer wrote: “Heavily loaded lorries pass from dawn until dusk through the village.” The quarrying ended in the early 1980s; restoration and tree-planting was carried out by Tilcon, and the site is now — South Lake a Site of Special Scientific Interest haunted by ducks, waders and anglers, North Lake the home of Ripon Sailing Club, who took up their first lease here in 1966 after the Boroughbridge bypass had spoiled their water on the River Ure.

Inghams — from shells to hi-fi.

The factory site opened in the Second World War as a shell-filling munitions plant run by Greenwood & Batley; even in 1970 the wooden walkways used to ferry workers between individual bunkers were still in place. After the war Mr. Robert Ingham took the site over and made hand-built furniture, then parquet flooring, then cabinets; the business eventually sold to a producer of electronic and musical equipment, and the factory now makes hi-fi cabinets sold worldwide. The site was later acquired by Treves UK; their automotive components factory operates from the same buildings.

Cliff Carr — Farnham’s only Enclosure.

Close to the entrance to the Inghams site there once ran a short straight track called Carr Lane, and in 1814 an agreement was made to “enclose stinted pasture called Cliff Carr.” The land on each side and across the top of the lane was divided into five allotments, given to James Meadley, Robert Gillings, John Metcalf, Sir Thomas Slingsby and the Rev. William Roundell. This is the only Enclosure recorded in the parish — in contrast to many English villages, Farnham was unusually free of the great Parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The site of Carr Lane is now under Inghams’ office block.

Throstle Nest and the mystery on the bank.

Adjacent to the Sailing Club land stands Throstle Nest, a late-eighteenth-century farmhouse occupied in 1841 by Francis Anderson, agricultural labourer, with his wife Mary and their six children. From 1851 it was farmed for forty years by George Robinson and his wife Hannah, both of them born in Farnham and part of the great family of Robinsons who farmed the parish for some hundred and fifty years.

Just beyond Throstle Nest and close to the road is a small ruined building, marked on the 1854 Ordnance Map but with no title given. The owners of the property tell a tradition that it was an isolation house for villagers with contagious diseases; older residents recall the delivery of ice blocks to it, suggesting an ice house. A sunny bank is unlikely for keeping ice cool, but a small building that began life serving one quiet purpose may well have found another over a long working life. The mystery is unsolved.

A line drawing of Throstle Nest Farm by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing a substantial two-storey stone farmhouse with mature trees alongside. — Throstle Nest Farm, late 18th century — from the 1996 book.

Quarry Farm, Rock Cottage, and the highway robbery of 1797.

As the lane climbs to the high point, the long view opens out over the village. Farnham Lane was not always so busy: the 1854 Ordnance map calls it a Bridle Road, and the cutting back of the bank and widening of the carriageway are comparatively recent. On Wednesday 30 August 1797 a tanner from Ripley named Peter Buck stood trial for highway robbery committed on this road; the trial generated its own pamphlet (price threepence). One of the witnesses, Ellen Sunderland, recalled that she “was driving her cows” when she saw the accused — a description that does not exclude her from also being, within a few years, the licensee of the Crown Inn opposite the church.

On Quarry Farm hill stands the water tower; the land was sold to Harrogate Corporation for £100 in 1937. Before then the village had no mains water supply, and there was no water on the hill: a specific clause in the deed reserved rights to a pipe-track from the farm down to a well across the road, in the farm at the cross-roads. That farm, on the left as one reaches the crossroads, was known as Rock Cottage Farm; in the mid-1980s its old buildings — one section so dilapidated it was propped up by baulks of timber — were converted into the houses that stand there now. One of them is called The Wheelhouse, for the horse-driven mill that once worked inside it.

Opposite the converted buildings, right on the cross-roads, was once the parish Pinfold — a small enclosure where stray animals were held by the parish Pinder until their owners paid the fine. There is a good surviving example a few miles south at Follifoot. Farnham’s pinfold has been lost for many years.

Stop Two

Low Hall and the Bickerdikes.

From the cross-roads, the lane up toward Staveley passes Low Hall — for almost a century and a half the seat of the Bickerdike family, recorded here from before 1530. Very little of the original building remains; the Hall has been much altered over the years. But the Bickerdike presence at Low Hall is one of the most fully-documented threads in Farnham’s history, woven through the parish registers and the Knaresborough Wills.

The full Bickerdike story — Edward Bickerdike’s pre-Reformation will of 1530, the execution of Robert Bickerdike at York in 1586 (he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987), the 1604 list of recusants naming Anne, Elizabeth and Jane Bickerdike, and the descent of the family through to Elizabeth Bickerdike who married Colonel Harvey in 1787 — is told in the Heritage page.

What can be added here is the long list of owners and occupiers of Low Hall itself, compiled by Bridger from the Land Tax Assessments and the Slingsby Papers:

1586 — Robert Bickerdike (the martyr)

1632 — Bernard Bickerdike

1633–1667 — Henry Bickerdike

1683 — Marmaduke Darley

1714–1742 — Joshua Crompton

1743–1799 — Sir John Coghill (with successive tenants Thorneyson, Thompson, Matterson)

1800–1831 — William Squires

1832–1910+ — Sir Thomas Slingsby (with tenants John Yates, William Squires, Matthew Carter and later William Marston and Richard Stead)

The Coghills were a wealthy and powerful Knaresborough family; their seat was Coghill Hall, built in 1555 by Marmaduke Coghill, which was sold by Sir John in 1796 to the Countess of Conyngham — enlarged and restored, it is now Conyngham Hall. The Coghill sale of Low Hall coincided with the wider Coghill disposal of their Farnham holdings, and marked the end of their family involvement with the village.

The Slingsbys took up where the Coghills left off and steadily built their Farnham holdings, becoming the largest landowners in the parish by the nineteenth century. Their family seat was Scriven Hall, and their full story — from Gamel the King’s Fowler down to the executed Sir Henry Slingsby of 1658 — is in the Heritage page also. The other family appearing repeatedly in the eighteenth-century records as a Farnham landlord, Henry Duncombe, came from Duncombe Park near Helmsley — the Duncombes had been making money in Ripon banking and London speculation; they put some of it into Farnham land.

III

Stop Three

The Old Manor House and Farnham Hall.

From the crossroads, the first house on the left is the Old Manor House. There is a date-stone of 1667, but parts of the building are probably older still — this may well be the oldest house in Farnham. The Rev. Waterer recorded a tradition that the original structure was “built round two trees, growing out of the ground and supporting the roof,” and during alterations he himself observed “the wall was built by the use of horizontal tree trunks laid upon each other and lashed together with a kind of straw rope.” The owners are aware of another quiet detail: within the foundations there is buried the remains of a priest — an intriguing mystery from the years when Catholic clergy moved discreetly through the recusant households of the north.

A line drawing of the Old Manor House by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing a long low building with date stone 1667, characteristic of seventeenth-century Yorkshire cottage architecture. — The Old Manor House — date stone 1667, but parts older still.

Through much of its life the Old Manor House was divided into three cottages, with a variety of trades operating from its rooms — a blacksmith’s, a butcher’s, and within living memory, in the cottage furthest from the road, a village shop run by a Mrs. Kitchen. By 1891 the cottage was a dressmaker’s, run by William Hood’s granddaughter Isabella. Five centuries of village trades under one roof.

The Oastlers.

Across the road from the Old Manor House the Oastler family were the principal household for over a century. They first appear in the parish register in 1658 with the marriage of Thomas Oastler to Anne Pickard. A later Thomas Oastler — probably his grandson — was the village surveyor who in 1754 gave Blind Jack Metcalf his first road-building contract (see Heritage). His daughters Dorothy (born 1730) and Mary (born 1743) became, between them, the largest landowners in Farnham; Mary married Thomas Bickerdike of Otley in 1765, and the two estates merged. The Hostlers’ Gift, recorded by the Church Commissioners in 1896 — a parcel of land let for five shillings a year “for the benefit of the poor of the parish” — was an Oastler charity, the spelling having drifted along the way.

Blind Jack himself is buried at Spofforth, his tombstone bearing the lines:

Here lies John Metcalf, whose infant sight
Felt the dark pressure of endless night;
’Twas his, a guide’s unerring aid to lend,
O’er trackless wastes to bid new roads extend. Epitaph, John Metcalf of Knaresborough, d. 1810

Farnham Hall.

The next building is Farnham Hall, probably built before 1700 and certainly the most prestigious house in the village. It belonged to the Bickerdikes — possibly the household to which they moved when they left Low Hall in about 1677. The Hearth Tax records for 1672 show three Bickerdike entries: Mr. B. Nicholls Bickerdike (3 hearths), Nicholas Bickerdike (2 hearths) and Barbara Bickerdike (3 hearths) — the multiple-hearth houses of a substantial family.

When the last of the line, Elizabeth Bickerdike (1767–1799), married Colonel Robert Harvey in 1787, the Hall became theirs. Elizabeth bore four children — James Vigor (born North Stainley 1788), Beauchamp (born Exmouth 1792), Frederick (born Farnham 1794) and Eliza (born Farnham 1796) — and died in 1799 aged thirty-two. “Her death marked the end of the Bickerdike family of Farnham,” wrote Bridger. Her memorial is still in the church.

Colonel Harvey continued at the Hall until 1817, when he sold the whole estate to the Shann family of Tadcaster. The Shanns — though they themselves lived elsewhere for most of the century — remained the major landowners through the nineteenth century. From about 1836 the Hall was leased to John Slater, whose family farmed in Farnham for over a hundred years, the tenancy passing from John to Samuel and on to John’s grandson, also John, and his wife Eleanor Mary, until about 1945.

A memorial in the church records a darker family entry from a later Shann generation:

Kenneth Shann, 2nd Lieut., 3rd Northumberland Fusiliers — only son of Lawrence and Lucy Shann, who fell in action at Friezenburg, near St. Julien, France, 8 May 1915, aged 20. Memorial, St Oswald’s

Stop Four

Glebe House, Fox House and the Collinses.

On the other side of the road from the Old Manor House stands Glebe House, dated by its stone to 1704. The name records that the land here was once church property — glebe land, attached to the parish for the support of its priest.

A line drawing of Glebe House by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book. The drawing shows a substantial double-fronted two-storey stone farmhouse with two prominent chimneys, a central pedimented porch over the front door, sash windows on both floors, an adjoining lower side wing on the left with two doorways at ground level, a low stone garden wall along the road, and the distinctive cobbled forecourt laid in the traditional Yorkshire pattern. — Glebe House — date stone 1704.

At the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–1540) much church land passed into lay hands, and the glebelands of Farnham came into the possession of Thomas Stockdale Esq. by 1634. The Stockdales held the rectory and the glebe for over a century. In 1740 Thomas Stockdale’s descendants sold the land to James Collins and Thomas Oastler — an arrangement that established the Collins family as patrons of the church, a connection that survives to this day.

Hargrove, writing in 1809, recorded the Stockdale story:

The Stockdales were Lords of the place for more than a hundred years. Christopher Stockdale was MP for Knaresborough for several Parliaments. He died in 1733 and was succeeded by William Stockdale, who was a sufferer in the infamous South Sea Scheme which ruined hundreds of families. The estate passed to that of Walton. Hargrove, History of Knaresborough, 1809

An earlier Thomas Stockdale had been Member of Parliament for Knaresborough from 1645, replacing the Royalist Sir Henry Slingsby, who had been expelled from the Commons in 1642. Stockdale supported Cromwell and emerged on the winning side of the Civil War. The Stockdales of the next generation lost half their fortune in the South Sea Bubble of 1720; what remained drifted away to the Waltons, and the family disappears from the Farnham story.

Fox House — the New Vicarage of 1912.

To the right of Glebe House, set back at some distance from the road, is Fox House — originally the New Vicarage. In 1910 an appeal was launched to build a proper vicarage in Farnham (until then the vicar had been compelled to live in Knaresborough). Money was raised — among the contributors were the Shann family, Miss Margaret Collins and Lord Mountgarret — the Church Commissioners made a grant, and the Shanns gave the land. The New Vicarage was built in 1912 for £1,580/6/2d. Of the early Ordnance map of this corner of the village, an old track called Barf Lane ran diagonally up the valley, probably to service a small stone quarry; its line is still partly traceable.

Beech Close.

Past Glebe House lies Beech Close, built about 1973 on what had been a smallholding occupied by the Sutherland family — and before them, glebeland. The two cottages at the entrance — Beech Cottage and Laragh Cottage — were originally one dwelling, pulled down and rebuilt as two cottages around 1920 (then known as Beech Cottage and Hurst Wood Cottage). They were part of the Shann estate, and we are told by a descendant of John Slater that before he and his family moved into the Hall in about 1836 they lived in Beech Cottage — and when the family finally left the Hall around 1945, their descendants again moved back into it.

Stop Five

Farnham House, Manor Farm and the village green.

Walking on toward the village green, one comes first to Farnham House — for generations the residence and farm of a part of the Robinson family. The 1881 census records five separate Robinson households in Farnham (a fact that makes single-family tracing in the records extremely difficult). John Robinson became tenant of the farm in 1881; he was succeeded by his son George, then by William, then by William’s son William Thomas Robinson, who farmed here until at least 1947. At some point after 1911 the Robinsons bought the property outright. Before 1831 the ownership had changed several times — the earliest record (1781–1825) shows the Matterson family as owners.

A line drawing of Farnham House by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing a substantial L-shaped farmhouse with sash windows and prominent stone chimneys. — Farnham House — the Robinson farmhouse.

Manor Farm.

The next property is Manor Farm — a working farm, now part of the Branton Court estate. An old house with later extensions, probably from around 1780. The tenants whose names survive:

Thomas Houseman, c. 1870 — c. 1902
William Henry Asquith, c. 1905 — c. 1920
Harry Petch, c. 1920 — c. 1930 (Farm Bailiff to Richard Murray of Branton Court)
Harry Varley, c. 1930 — 1970

A line drawing of Manor Farm by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing a long low whitewashed farmhouse with stone outbuildings, multiple chimneys, and garden walls. — Manor Farm.

Sally George Cottage and Bessie John’s.

Between Manor Farm and Farnham House there once stood a small stone cottage with a pantile roof, described in 1911 as “dilapidated” and demolished shortly after; a few stones can still be seen. The Rev. Waterer recorded that the cottage was known to the village as Sally George Cottage, and the house opposite (now Farnham Grange) was Bessie John’s. The best guess at the names is that they distinguished between two Robinson households of the same generation — George & Isabella (Sally) Robinson, and John & Elizabeth Robinson. The naming convention is uncommonly graceful: the first Christian name of one partner appended to the first of the other, gendered to the house.

Farnham Grange and the Rifle Club.

The Bessie John house — now Farnham Grange — was for the first half of the twentieth century the home of Charles Bailey Elmhirst, who lived there from about 1900 to 1940. The directories of the period list him as Poultry Farmer and Beekeeper, or simply Apiarist. He was an active village man and a trustee of the Church Parish Room. When he died in 1940, aged 70, his address was given as The Rifle Range — a small-bore range that had been established just over the garden wall. The range had to be closed when a War Department inspector visited and was so “appalled at the dangerous position” that he ordered it relocated to the quarry on the hill. Elmhirst, who had fought in the Boer War, almost certainly founded the Rifle Club. His wife remained at the house until about 1949.

Corneville Court and the Gilling family.

Next to Farnham Grange, facing the village green, stands Corneville Court. There were documents connected with this house dating back to 1733, but the building is probably older. A long-standing village belief held that it was originally the village blacksmith’s, and a 1911 document does refer to a “Smithy adjoining”: probably the building in the garden, which backs on to the road. Bridger’s patient compilation of the Land Tax records gives a remarkably full owner-and-occupier table:

1733 — 1781 — Richard Bell, Will Sharp, W. Garbutt, James Kettlewell, J. Yorker

1781 — 1794 — J. Yorker (owner); Joseph Coghill then James Stockdale (occupiers)

1795 — 1808 — Chippindale, then Robert Shutt

1809 — 1812 — John Baxter, Lime Burner

1813 — 1853 — Robert Gilling, Lime Burner

1854 — 1885 — Robert Gilling Jnr., Shepherd

1886 — William Gilling

1889 — 1915 — Thomas Jackson (in whose descendants’ hands it remains)

The most arresting detail in the Gilling story comes from the will of John Gilling of Occaney, who died in 1797 and left the Farnham property to his nephew Robert Gilling — who was born, surprisingly, in Lucea, Jamaica. The source of the family’s relative wealth may have been in the West Indies; Robert went on to become both lime-burner and Parish Constable. His sister Rebecca, born 1820, ran a grocer’s shop from Corneville from the 1860s onwards.

A line drawing of Corneville Court by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing a substantial stone house surrounded by mature trees with a low garden wall. — Corneville Court — tenant-tracked from 1733.

The village green.

The village green sits at the centre of the village — tended and mown by villagers, lit each spring with daffodils. Central on the green is a silver birch tree planted in 1909, and beside it a fine seat awarded to the village as winners of the Best Kept Village (Lower Dales Section) in 1995. On the far side stands the village red telephone box, which is a listed building — the only way to keep the old-style box and resist its replacement by a later model, the village was advised, was to list it. So it is.

Stop Six

Farnham Lodge and the lost almshouses.

Overlooking the green on the north side, on the road to Scotton, stands Farnham Lodge — another old house much altered over the centuries, and originally the Farnham vicarage. How it became detached from that role is itself a small mystery.

A document of 1858 records the patrons of the church (Thomas Collins and the Shanns) releasing “Rectory Close” — the field behind the church — to the Rev. Aaron Manby. Strangely, Manby was the vicar of Nidd, not Farnham. The likely explanation is that the then-vicar of Farnham, the Rev. Collins, was already living in Knaresborough and had no use for the Farnham Lodge house; he had effectively let it go to the Manbys, and from there it passed in about 1865 to Rev. Robert Elmhirst, vicar of Brearton. The Elmhirsts had nine children, and Robert is said to have planted a tree for each child born in the house — though it is no longer obvious which tree is which, and a later owner felled several. Their first Farnham-born son, in 1871, was Charles Bailey Elmhirst, who would later occupy Bessie John’s across the road. Rev. Robert Elmhirst died in 1905.

The Elmhirsts were succeeded for a short period by a family named Gartside, and then by Mrs. Slingsby; the Lodge had become, in effect, the Dower House for the Slingsbys of Scriven. A memorial in the church records the loss of her son:

Midshipman John A. Slingsby, who lost his life on HMS Formidable in 1915. Memorial, St Oswald’s

Mrs. Slingsby remained at the Lodge until her death in 1926. She is the lady with the three dogs in the 1923 village gathering photograph on the Heritage page.

A line drawing of Farnham Lodge by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing the original vicarage house surrounded by mature trees, with multiple chimneys and gabled roof sections. — Farnham Lodge — the original Farnham vicarage.

Manor Cottage, Old Cottage and Shaw Lane.

If one keeps to the right of the green, this is the beginning of Shaw Lane — after half a mile or so the lane becomes unsurfaced and continues as an ancient trackway, in earlier centuries the direct route between Knaresborough and Ripon. The 1854 Ordnance Survey marks it as a Bridle Road, and there is evidence that it served as a drove road for moving cattle from the north into the towns of the West Riding.

The first house on the right is Manor Cottage — originally two cottages, converted into one around 1980. The next house, Old Cottage, was also originally two dwellings and served as servants’ quarters for Farnham Lodge; the conversion into one house was made in 1914, and Mrs. Slingsby gifted the property to its occupants in 1925. The building material is largely cobble — large round smooth stones ploughed up across the parish for centuries; an indigenous material, cheap and long-lasting but not the easiest shape with which to build.

The Old Village Hall — five lives of one building.

At the small cross-roads at the top of Shaw Lane stands the house called The Old Village Hall, which has been repurposed five times in two hundred years:

1786 — a blacksmith’s shop, paying ten shillings and sixpence a year “for the poor of the parish”
c. 1820 — converted into almshouses for the village’s elderly poor
1874 — demolished and replaced by a Wesleyan Chapel
1933–35 — bought by the village, converted into the Parish Church Room, opened 6 March 1935 (“by a generous tea, provided by Mr. Hepworth, at no cost to the village”)
1981–83 — converted into the private dwelling we see today

The notion that an almshouse stood on the site is supported both by the early Ordnance Survey map (which marks the spot “Towns Houses”) and by a careful reading of the census — only one woman is explicitly described as pauper, but the entries adjacent to hers list several other elderly widows of labourers, all of whom would have struggled to support themselves. The pattern changes abruptly from 1871: thereafter the parish registers note paupers as dying at the Union Workhouse at Knaresborough, established in the great consolidation that followed the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.

The copper mine on Folly Hill.

The track which forks to the right past the Old Village Hall passes a clump of trees and rocks called Folly Hill. Hargrove’s 1800 account records that in 1757 a copper mine was opened on this spot, “which failed for want of proper management” — an indictment repeated by every subsequent writer on the subject. Folly Hill is one of the highest points in the parish; on a clear day the view eastward takes in the White Horse of Kilburn and the Hambleton Hills across the Vale of York. The mine itself has left almost no trace.

VII

Stop Seven

Branton Court and Shaw Lane.

Continuing north down Shaw Lane one arrives at the entrance to Branton Court, with its extensive outbuildings. This impressive house was started in 1860 by a Mr. Oates (probably Frederick Oates of Knaresborough, linen manufacturer and landowner). The original principal entrance was by a grand curved drive from the Farnham–Scotton road — long closed and overgrown.

In 1871 the occupant was Frederick Oates with two daughters and two servants, and the house was called Holly House. By 1881 it had passed to William Ingilby JP, whose 1881 household was the largest in the parish:

William Ingilby JP · his wife Eleanor (of Scottish descent) · twin sons William Henry and John Uchtrech McDonald · sister Wilhelmina (a baronet’s daughter) · sister-in-law Anne McDonald · plus a staff of two ladies’ maids, a nurse, cook, parlourmaid, laundrymaid, housemaid and kitchenmaid. 1881 census

The young William Henry Ingilby became the 3rd Baronet, and the father of Sir Jocelyn Ingilby of Ripley Castle.

Between 1892 and 1897 the house passed to Robert Inchbold Robson — farmer and racehorse trainer — who, Bridger drily notes, “was a better trainer than gambler and had financial difficulties.” It was Robson who changed the name from Holly House to Branton Court. By 1913 he had sold the principal house and moved into a new house built on Branton Court land at the far end of the village (now Beauvale House, Hunters Moon and Ford House, then collectively called Ravenscliffe), where he continued his horse training until his death in 1940.

From 1913 to 1928 Branton Court was the home of Richard Thomas Murray, gentleman racehorse-owner, and his wife Blanche Beatrice Murray (formerly Mrs. Bale Robinson) with her step-daughter Dorothy Bale Robinson. A memorial in the church records the loss of Blanche’s son in the war:

Gilbert Bale Robinson, 1st 6th Yorkshire Regiment — only son of the late John Henry Robinson of Leeds and Blanche Beatrice Murray of Farnham. Killed in action on the Somme, 1916, aged 20. Memorial, St Oswald’s

Blanche died in 1925 and Richard Thomas in 1928. After two years standing empty the house was acquired in 1930 by Captain (later Major) and Mrs. Ambler; initially with fifty acres, then expanding over the years to include Manor Farm. Captain Ambler died in 1958; Mrs. Ambler was still in residence when Bridger compiled his account in the mid-1990s, and it was she who told him the story of the WWII army commander mistaking the “Site of Walkingham Hall” on the map for an active building, “and being told gently that for accommodation he was several centuries adrift.”

A line drawing of Branton Court by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing a substantial Victorian country house with hipped roof, sash windows and tall trees beside it. — Branton Court — built 1860 as Holly House.

Branton Court Cottages and the White Cottage.

Across the road from Old Cottage stand three houses belonging to the Branton Court estate, built around 1914 of brick built around existing stone and cobble (the older building may have been a cottage attached to an old stone barn). Beside them is the White Cottage — a very old building of cobble, then rendered, also used as a staff cottage for Branton Court. The exact date of building is unknown.

Walkingham Hall and the water mill.

Continuing north down Shaw Lane for another half mile one reaches the bridge over Shaw Beck and the northern edge of the parish. From here, looking south-west, one can see the meadow under Walkingham Hill where the lost twelfth-century manor house once stood — with its avenue of aged oaks, its gardens and its fish ponds — and from where the modern parish takes its name. The site of the medieval Farnham Mill is almost certainly the field on the south side of Shaw Beck, where the lane still makes an unexplained little diversion as it crosses the bridge — perhaps once skirting the millpond. The full Walkingham story is in the Heritage page.

VIII

Stop Eight

The Crown Inn, Lime Tree Cottages and the lost school.

Across the road from the church stands the Crown Inn — an arrangement (church and pub facing each other across the green) which applies to most English villages. We do not know when an inn was first established in Farnham, nor when it was first called The Crown. Alehouses had been part of rural life since the thirteenth century; the Alehouse Act of 1552 required them to be licensed by the Justices, and by the mid-eighteenth century there were said to be about 50,000 taverns in the country. Bridger, with characteristic precision, notes that “Strictly speaking Alehouses sold ale and beer; Taverns could also sell wine; and Inns must provide food and shelter as well.”

Before 1832 the Crown was owned and occupied by Ellen Sunderland, who had acquired it from John Steel in about 1801. Ellen was a witness at the highway-robbery trial of Peter Buck in 1797 (when she said she “was driving her cows”); the will of John Steel in 1799 names her as a beneficiary. From 1832 onwards a list of publicans survives:

1832 — 1861 — James Dawson (also a farm labourer, then innkeeper and farmer of 9 acres)

1862 — 1865 — George Calvert

1871 — 1889 — Ambrose Jarratt (also Agricultural Machinery Maker)

1892 — John Robinson

1897 — Miles Holmes

1907 — Paul Padgett

1908 — 1909 — Henry Bowland

1912 — Walter Pauling

1913 — Ernest Swann

1915 — Aubrey Thomas Mann

1927 — Vincent Watson

1936 — Edward Russett

c. 1940s — Joseph Arthur Horner (named on the licensee’s plaque above the door in the c. 1940s photograph — see the Crown Inn in the archive gallery; the period after Edward Russett is otherwise blank in the village record)

The Crown has, almost always, been a part-time job — the publican typically also a farm labourer, a farmer of a few acres, or even (in Ambrose Jarratt’s case) an agricultural machinery maker.

A line drawing of The Crown Inn at Farnham by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing the white-painted two-storey village inn with its prominent ‘THE CROWN’ sign, sash windows and central front door. — The Crown Inn — opposite the church.

Lime Cottages and the Heron Cottages.

Next to the Crown is Crown Cottage (very little is known of it — once probably a brewhouse or stabling), then The Limes (a more recent single-storey building) and Lime Cottages — among the older houses in the village, in one family’s hands for three generations; one of them was originally called Church Cottage. Just beyond, on the same side, are the two Heron Cottages — semi-detached but, oddly, not built at the same time. The first (further from the church) was built about 1910 as staff quarters for Heron Court; the second was not built until about 1947, almost forty years later.

The lost school.

Directly opposite Heron Cottage there was once the school. It occupied the present gap at the end of the churchyard, and part of the churchyard itself. It was a National School — one of the schools of the National Society for the Promotion of Education of the Poor in the Doctrine and Discipline of the Established Church, founded in 1811 as the Church of England’s response to the non-denominational British and Foreign Schools Society. Farnham’s National School was built around 1820 by the Rev. Thomas Collins at his own expense. The 1841 census suggests around 40 children of school age in the village, though not all of them necessarily attended — school attendance was not compulsory until further Acts in 1876 and 1880. The charge was one penny a week.

The schoolmaster from 1838 to 1850 was John Fox; among his pupils were the brothers Samuel and John Slater (sons of John Slater of Farnham Hall), and exercise books survive from this period, “all written in the most beautiful handwriting.” The school was used until about 1875, when, following the Education Act of 1870, it was replaced by a new and larger school at Lingerfield serving several parishes. By 1897 a record describes the Farnham building as “now in ruins”; it has since vanished entirely.

Ford House, Beauvale House and Hunters Moon.

Past the site of the lost school are Ford House, Beauvale House and Hunters Moon — today three separate houses, originally one principal house with attached stables, built about 1910 and originally called Ravenscliffe. It was Robert Inchbold Robson who, while owning Branton Court, had Ravenscliffe built — and then sold Branton Court and moved into the new house, where he continued his horse training. The conversion of the original house into three was carried out by a local builder named Braithwaite (the houses were known for a period as Braithwaite Cottages).

A line drawing of Ford House (originally Ravenscliffe) by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing a long two-storey house with multiple chimneys. — Ford House — once part of Ravenscliffe.

Stop Nine

Heron Court, Sunnyside Farm and Stang Hall.

Opposite Beauvale House and Hunters Moon stands Heron Court — a beautiful house in a “romantic style,” built about 1910 for a family called Driffield. Despite extensive searching, the identity of the architect has not been established. The house passed from Thomas Henry Driffield to John Edward Fawcett some time before 1918, and in 1940 was sold by the Fawcett family to John Anthony Dean. Memorials in the church mark two of the Fawcett losses in the two World Wars:

Edward Bertram Fawcett, Captain, 92nd Punjabis — second son of John Edward and Alice Fawcett, who fell in action at Sunni-I-Yat, Mesopotamia, 22 April 1916, aged 22.

Walter Lindley Fawcett MC, Brigadier, 9th Gurkha Rifles — missing, 1942. Memorials, St Oswald’s

The grounds of Heron Court have always been beautiful — and the successive owners have, each in their turn, made them available for village functions. The Rev. Waterer recalled with affection a garden party held there on a wonderful summer day in 1955: “Miss Winifred Fawcett, a former resident of Heron Court, opened the party. There was a Flannel Dance in the evening on the lawn. The Vicar danced with Mrs. Dean.”

A line drawing of Heron Court by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing an Edwardian house in romantic style with steep gables, dormer windows and tall chimneys, set among mature trees. — Heron Court — built about 1910 in the “romantic style”.

The land on which Heron Court stands — called Hall Garth on the 1854 Ordnance map, with a separate notation “Site of Hall” close to the boundary — raises an unsolved question. Dr. Francis Collins, writing in the Registers of Farnham, mentioned that during the reign of Elizabeth I, Scotton was the abode of members of the “Bainbridge, Danby, Gifford, Jennings, Percy, Pullen and Vavasour families” — and added that “the Roundells also made Farnham their headquarters in the reigns of James I and Charles I and II.” If a Roundell Hall ever stood in Farnham, this site (now under Heron Court and its grounds) is the most likely place. As Bridger said: “Another nice mystery to solve.”

Ware End Beck and the canal that never was.

Running through the grounds of Heron Court is a small stream called Ware End Beck, piped under the Scotton road before joining Shaw Beck. Within living memory the stream crossed the road as a water splash — an unsurfaced ford. Bridger cheerfully suggested that as a millennium project the village might restore it as “a traffic calming device.”

Hargrove’s history of Knaresborough preserves a more ambitious might-have-been from February 1800: a meeting was held at the Sessions house at Knaresborough to adopt a plan for a canal from the River Ure to Knaresborough, routed past Farnham — up Shaw Beck, between Heron Court’s eventual position and the parish boundary, to terminate at Cold Keld (now under South Lake). The estimate was £22,908. The scheme was rejected — wisely, since within thirty years the Railway Age would render the project obsolete.

Sunnyside Farm.

South of Heron Court stands Sunnyside Farm, late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The land between Sunnyside and Lime Cottages was once called Slush Bogs, and in the 1841 census Sunnyside itself appears as Slush Bogs House. The farm was small — in 1861 William West was farming just four acres. Sunnyside and the surrounding land was owned by the Driffields (the Heron Court family); from about 1865 to 1927 it was occupied by the Wrathall family, and later by the Rhodes family — the same family whose memorial in St Oswald’s records Walter John Rhodes, Churchwarden from 1940 to 1970.

The Cricket Field and Stang Hall.

Across the road from Heron Court, the field after the stream is still known as the Cricket Field. It was used by Farnham cricket team from before 1930 until 1939, when it was ploughed up as part of the war effort. A small pavilion stood there and teas were served. After the war the pitch was not re-laid; one final match was played on the field in 1977, a celebration match to mark the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

Past the long straight stretch of road that runs alongside Driffields’ Plantation stands the last house in the village — Stang Hall. Probably originally seventeenth-century, the house has been known over the years as Stang House, Farnham Myers, Tewit Myers, Tewit Cottage, Stang Lane Cottage and now Stang Hall. There is a local story — long impossible to verify — that graffiti left by Cromwell’s men in 1644 survived inside the house for some centuries; if it ever existed, it is gone now. The word tewit, spelled variously, is the local name for the Lapwing: Tewit Myers, said Bridger, “seems a particularly nice note on which to end our examination of the houses of Farnham.” And so it does.

Conclusion

From Bridger’s closing words.

Villages such as Farnham came into being primarily to serve agriculture — to provide labour and services for the land. It is estimated that in the early eighteenth century, eighty per cent of the entire population lived by agriculture. The village took a thousand years to develop and then was subjected to the short, sharp shock of the industrial revolution — a decline in the number of people required to work the land, the growth of manufacturing, a population explosion and the movement from the countryside to the towns.

It is difficult to entirely dismiss the jibe that we are living in a ‘museum’ — but then we still can see the bats flicker in the dusk and hear the owl in the churchyard — and we help to preserve a place of beauty which everyone can enjoy. Richard Bridger, The Village of Farnham, 1996 — closing words

A panoramic line drawing of Farnham seen from Farnham Lane, by an artist for Bridger’s 1996 book, showing the village as a low cluster of stone houses with the tower of St Oswald’s rising above the trees. — Farnham, seen from Farnham Lane — the closing illustration of the 1996 book.

Richard Bridger · The Village of Farnham · Farnham Historical Society, 1996

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A walk throughFarnham.