Unto the mournful fate of young John Moore, Who fell a victim to some villain’s power, In Richmond Lane, near to Ask Hall, ’tis said, – There was his life most cruelly betrayed. Shot with a gun by some abandoned rake, Then knock’d o’th’ head with a hedging stake, His soul, I trust, is with the blest above, There to enjoy eternal rest and love; Then let us pray his murderer to discover, That he to justice soon may be brought over.
OUR quest for curious churchyard memorials takes us to Gilling West, a village so important in Anglo-Saxon times that it was the capital of an area, known as a “wapentake”, that stretched from Richmond to Barnard Castle and out to Arkengarthdale and Bowes in the Pennines.
It is a place of murder.
Here on August 20, 651AD, Oswin, king of Deira (which stretched from the Tees to the Humber) was betrayed by Hunwald, of Gilling, whom he supposed to be his friend, to Oswy, king of Bernicia (which stretched from the Tees to the Forth), and Oswy had Oswin slain.
This effectively united the two kingdoms to form the powerful Northumbria.
But Oswy’s wife, Eanfled, was a cousin of the murdered Oswin, and she founded a religious house at Gilling where priests could say prayers for both her cousin and her husband. Until it was destroyed by the rampaging Vikings, this house reinforced Gilling’s importance.
St Agatha's Church, Gilling West (Image: Chris Lloyd)
The church of St Agatha dates from the 11th Century, although there are several earlier carved stones from the mists of history.
Lydia Colling's 1764 headstone in Gilling West churchyard with expansive angel's wings (Image: Chris Lloyd)
The large churchyard is beautifully kept, the low sun of an autumn Saturday picking out every detail of the wide-held wings of an angel on the reverse of the headstone of Lydia Colling, of Hartforth, who died in 1764, aged 60.
Above the angel’s wings is a Latin motto, “Specta sinum vitae”, which literally translates as “behold the bosom of life”. It must be encouraging the viewer to contemplate the brief but warm embrace of life.
The front of the Moores' headstone, with the metal plate pinned to it in Gilling West churchyard (Image: Chris Lloyd)
Nearby is the headstone of the Moores – Elizabeth, who died in 1753, and her husband John, who died in 1758, and their son, John, who was murdered on December 16, 1758.
Pinned to the front of the stone is a metal plate which records that the two Johns were braziers – workers of brass and copper.
On the other side, rather weathered, beneath some less demonstrative angel’s wings, is the verse which tells how poor John, 30*, “fell a victim to some villain’s power”.*
The poem on John Moore's headstone telling how he was most cruelly murdered on December 16, 1758, between Richmond and Gilling West (Image: Chris Lloyd)
He was returning from Richmond market, where presumably he had been selling his metal items like cooking pots and candlesticks, when near Olliver Ducket – the eyecatcher on the brow of the hill between Richmond and Gilling – he was set upon: shot with a gun and then smashed on the head with a hedging stake.
Olliver Ducket, on the outskirts of Richmond, by Northern Perspectives (Image: Northern Perspectives)
As the headstone suggests, local people were very concerned that the murderer be brought to justice. In fact, Lord Holderness of Aske Hall, who was effectively the Foreign Secretary of the day, raised the matter with Prime Minister William Pitt.
But it was to no avail.
The killer was never caught.
An inquest into John’s death was held by the Richmond coroner, mayor Henry Lanchester, who had led the investigation, and returned a verdict of “murder by person or persons unknown”.
John was then buried in the Gilling churchyard.
But then someone noticed that the spot where he was killed was just outside the Richmond boundary in the old Gilling wapentake, which was now under the jurisdiction of the North Riding County Coroner, so John’s body was exhumed, a second inquest was conducted, and a second verdict of “murder by person or persons unknown” was returned, and he was re-buried in the same grave.
The Moore Cup, presented to Richmond by the grateful family of murdered John Moore in 1759, is on display in the Green Howards Museum (Image: Richmond Town Council)
However, there cannot have been any hard feelings among the Moore family regarding the failure to find the perpetrator because in the silver collection of Richmond Town Council is the Moore Cup, currently on display in the Green Howards Museum in the centre of the town.
The inscription on it reads: “The gift of George Moore of East Witton to the Mayor and Corporation of Richmond forever as a grateful acknowledgement of their honest and zealous endeavours to the discover the execrable murderers of his kinsman, John Moore of Gilling, perpetrated December 16th 1758. Henry Lanchester, Mayor”.
The 1764 headstone of Ann and William Waller with the "adieu vain world" poem on it in Gilling West churchyard (Image: Chris Lloyd)
WE wandered off to Gilling West at the recommendation of Alister Matheson, of Richmond, who directed us to the headstone shared by Ann and William Waller. The lichen-covered front seems to say that they died on the same day, July 12, 1764, with Ann aged 21 and William aged six.
The low sun on the reverse picks out a familiar verse:
Farewell vain world I've had enough of thee
But now am careless what thou sayest of me.
Thy smiles I court not nor thy frowns I fear,
My cares are past and my head lies quiet here.
What faults you saw in me take care to shun
Look but of home, enough there's to be done.
These are the first six of 10 lines that appear on the headstone of Elizabeth Brown in Kirkby Fleetham churchyard. She died in 1836, aged 70, and was reputed to be the much-gossiped-about mother of five or six illegitimate children. The tongue-wagging nature of her life makes the last four lines so pointed:
Where'er I lived or dy'd it matters not
To whom related or by whom begot.
You now cannot ask no more of me
Tis all I am and all that you shall be.
Written by an unknown scribe, this verse first appears in the 1750s. It is to be found on headstones in places from Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire to Kensington in London to Lound in Suffolk. It appears to be a stock poem that stonemasons could use should a client wish, although it is usually in its six line form.
(Image: Unknown)
SALTBURN pier stretched 1,500ft out into the forbidding North Sea until, 100 years ago, a storm swept a ship through it, slicing the pier in half.
The ship was the SS Ovenbeg and, although the thousands of people gathered on the beach did not know it at the time, it was haunted by the ghost of a Russian monk.
The newspaper headline from 1933 telling how the Ovenbeg was haunted by a Russian monk (Image: Chris Lloyd)
In truth, we didn’t know this either until, searching for something else, we stumbled across a newspaper report from 1933 which concerned the retirement in London of Charles O’Connor, a ship’s cook.
Mr O’Connor said that he had started out on a Russian barquentine (a sailing vessel with three or more masts but a square sail only on its front mast) called the St Nicolai, of Archangel, which was owned by Russian monks.
However, the St Nicolai was bought by an English firm and renamed as the Ovenbeg – it was very fashionable in the 1920s to name ships after Irish rivers, and the Abhainn Bheag, or Ovenbeg, is in County Cork.
But, said Mr O’Connor, as soon as the takeover went through, strange things began happening on board. There was often someone in the rigging, messing with the blocks and tackle. Ropes always needed an extra haul, as if there was someone, unseen, on the other end.
“I’m not superstitious, but it got me thinking,” said Mr O’Connor.
He continued: “Finally, the ship was wrecked at Saltburn.”
The Ovenbeg stranded beside Saltburn pier the day before it was driven through the structure (Image: Chris Lloyd)
This was on May 7, 1924. The Ovenbeg was carrying china clay from Cornwall to Grangemouth, in the Firth of Forth, when a storm drove her onto the beach beside the pier. Twenty-four hours later, a second storm picked up the stricken vessel and threw it through the pier.
“We were pounded on the sands and crashed into the pier,” Mr O’Connor told the newspaper. “The decks burst open under us.
“A Russian pigeon came aboard us before we were wrecked – the skipper knew it by the ring on its leg.
“It would not leave until every man-jack of us left the ship.
“As the ship went down, the figure of a Russian monk appeared on the shore, and remained until she disappeared.
“Then he, too, vanished from sight.”
The gap left by the Ovenbeg in 1924 (Image: Chris Lloyd)
Saltburn pier is today 682ft long.
Richmond grandstand (Image: Vale Ecology)
WORK has begun on the restoration of Richmond racecourse grandstand - the oldest sporting grandstand in the world. On Wednesday, October 21, Richmond and District Civic Society is hosting an evening in Richmond Upper School Hall in which Graham Berry will tell of the grandstand's history, and Holly Spilsbury, the senior architect on the restoration, will talk about the plans for the repair.
Admission for members of the society, and students, is free. Visitors £10. The evening starts at 7.30pm.
The boundary stone from the top of Great Pinseat Hill between Swaledale and Arkengarthdale (Image: Christian Player)
AT 1,682ft high, Great Pinseat Hill is the watershed between Swaledale and Arkengarthdale. A boundary runs across its summit, dividing dale from dale, landowner from landowner.
Correspondent Christian Player reports that, as shown on the Ordnance Survey map, there are still several boundary stones up there, with A for Arkengarthdale on one side and S for Swaledale on the other.
“The drystone wall that runs right across the summit and the part of it to the east of the trig point is higher than the rest,” says Christian. “It has a significant-sized stone incorporated into it which has an old legend on it. Any idea who could have done it and why?”
The inscription says: “Wetshaw Head AP 19 1797.”
More than 200 years ago, this remote corner of the world was hotly fought over – not because of its pure air and stunning views, but because of what lay beneath its soil (or peat).
In 1675, there was a dispute between Thomas Lord Wharton, who owned Swaledale, and Charles Bathurst, who owned Arkengarthdale, over a “cole pit in the Wet Shaw”.
By 1710, they were at it again, this time arguing over who owned the lead beneath the moor. One of Bathurst’s men was seen dismantling a boundary cairn and moving it to his lord’s benefit, and there seems to have been some sort of summit between the two camps, even the two men, at the summit.
Not that this should suggest that Bathurst was in the wrong. Lord Wharton (1648-1715) was a Whig politician who was renowned as the most inventive and original liar of his day and as the most dissolute person in the country – an opponent in the House of Lords in 1705 told how in 1682 Lord Wharton had been so drunk he had broken into a church in Gloucestershire and urinated on the altar and defecated in the pulpit.
Perhaps, then, his boundary cairns were not always in the most reliable places.
It was, therefore, necessary for an agreed boundary between the two estates.
It could be that Christian’s stone marks the boundary that was agreed on April 19, 1797.
Alternatively, it could be that the “AP” on the stone refers not to April but the initials of the surveyor who drew up the agreed boundaries – how we were hoping it would say “AC” because that might have been Anthony John Clarkson, the Ravenseat farmer and teacher who drew the first maps of Swaledale that were published in 1841 (it is Mr Clarkson’s barn, known as “Anty John’s”, that the Yorkshire Shepherdess Amanda Owen is doing up in her television series).
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We don’t know who AP might have been, but this might have been boundary stone number 19 placed up there in 1797.
- If you can tell us anymore about the boundary stone, or if you know of any interesting or unusual headstones, or if you have a ship that is haunted by Russian monks, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
- With thanks to Heather Lawler and Zoe Utley