Exploring our family’s cave
Kirkdale cave, 5km south of Farndale
If you have
the chance to visit Kirkdale cave,
you might enjoy the following extract from Cider with Rose in which Laurie Lee
reflected on the search for his ghostly beginnings as he uncovered the antic
past of his cave. If you can’t get to the cave, you will still enjoy the
extract.
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.