Exploring our family’s cave
Kirkdale cave, 5km south of Farndale
The Kirkdale cave is only five hundred
metres from our eleventh century ancestral home, the church at Kirkdale which
was the focus of our forebears for generations. It is a short drive south of
Farndale.
In Cider
with Rosie, Laurie Lee reflected on the search for his ancestral
beginnings as he uncovered the antic past of an imaginary cave. The Farndale
story benefits from a real cave which is a portal in the midst of our family
lands to a different era of geological time. It is the perfect place to reflect
upon our search for our lineage.
The
village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past,
a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely
ancestral.
This cave
that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly
beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by
electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema
screens.
It was
something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know – the blood and beliefs of
generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous
contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever.
But
arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old
as the glaciers.
There
were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill
had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to
them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley –
tree-clumps, corners in woods – that bore separate, antique, half-muttered
names that were certainly older than Christian. The women in their talk still
used these names which are not used now any more.
There was
also a frank and unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as
a kind of ritual which no one accused or pardoned. In our grey stone village,
especially in winter, such stories never seemed strange. When I sat at home
among my talking sisters, or with an old woman sucking her jaws, and heard the
long details of hapless suicides, of fighting men loose in the snow, of
witch-doomed widows disembowelled by bulls, of childeating
sows, and so on – I would look through the windows and see the wet walls
streaming, the black trees bend in the wind, and I saw these things
happening as natural convulsions of our landscape, and though dry-mouthed, I
was never astonished.
(Cider
with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, 1959)
In The History of Kilton, With a
Sketch of the Neighbouring Villages, By the Returned Emigrant, John Farndale,
in 1870, began to examine the book of records, and genealogies of former
days, days of his fathers’, and of his youth. I remember said he some one hundred and
twenty parents and children, besides men-servants and women-servants; I
remember ten farmers occupant of some seven hundred acres of land, and now it’s
absorbed into one large farm, by laying field to field, and adding farm to
farm. Surely this gentleman must be Lord of Kilton Manors, for formerly it
comprised two Manors.
Then he
asked, where are all those respected farmers? Had they and their sons to
find a home in some far-away land, and to perish out of sight? I see in the
book recorded and registered in olden time, the names of farmers who once
occupied this great farm – R and W Jolly, M Young, R Mitchell; W Wood, J Harland,
T Toas, J Readman, J
Farndale, S
Farndale, J and
W Farndale,
all these tenants once occupied this great farm; now blended into one.
I
remember what a muster at the Kilton rent days, twice a year, when dinner was
provided for a quarter of a hundred tenants, Brotton,
Moorsholm, Stanghoe,
those paid their rents at Kilton; and were indeed belonging to the Kilton
Court, kept here also, and the old matron proudly provided a rich plum
pudding and roast beef; and the steward also a jolly punch bowl, for it was
a pleasure to him to take the rents at Kilton, the day before Skelton rent day.
The steward always called old J Farndale to
the vice-chair, he being old, and the oldest tenant. Farndale’s was the most
numerous family, and had lived on the estate for many ages. Kilton had many
mechanics, and here we had a public house, a meeting house, two lodging houses,
and a school house, to learn our ABCs, from which sprang two eminent school
masters, who became extremely popular; we had a butcher’s shop, we had a London
tailor and is apprentice, and eight other apprentices more; we had a rag
merchant and a shop which sold song books, pins, needles, tape and thread; we
had five sailors, two soldiers, two missionaries, besides a number of old
people, aged 80, 90 and 100 years. But last, not least, Wm Tulley Esq., who took so much interest in the old castle – planted
its orchard, bowling green, and made fish ponds, which were fed by a reservoir
near the Park House, Kiltonthorpe, Kilton Lodge,
together with all these improvements around the castle, which are now no more.