Many wondrous aspects of country life, from tobacco farming in Ryedale to the heinous “Yorkshire Witch” as well as the cleverness of “thruff doors”, will be up for discussion tonight as author Sally Coulthard appears at the Richmond Walking & Book Festival.
About 20 years ago, Sally escaped city life and, with her gardener husband, acquired a rundown small-holding in the Howardian Hills, near Ampleforth. While clearing out her barn of the dust of ages, she uncovered six circles the size of dinner plates had been scratched into the plaster with daisy petals inscribed inside.
“A quick phone call to an archaeologist friend revealed that these strange scratchings were “witches’ marks” – patterns etched into plaster to ward off bad spirits and bring good fortune,” she says. “It made me wonder about the people who had been around the Barn before us – generations of rural families who occupied a corner of the world where, for centuries, superstition, religion, nature, work and home life jostled side by side.”
That wonder has resulted in 25 books written from her shed about nature, history and the fashionable way to dress your shed – “shedchic”, she calls it.
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All her books are rooted in the countryside. Her newest is The Barn, in which she discovers that her barn was built about 200 years ago with plenty of room to swing a swipple – the special stick used for threshing before a threshing machine was invented. Her barn is a classic threshing barn, with a wide doorway for a cart and a smaller door on the wall opposite.
“Few people notice that threshing barns are often orientated to make the most of the wind,” she says. “Both small and large doors would be opened when it was time to winnow the corn, the tasks of separating the husks or chaff from the grain. For that, it was useful to have the cross-draught that was created by opening the “through doors” (or “thruff” doors, as they’re known in North Yorkshire). The labourer could then hold a shallow basket full of grain, toss the contents in the air, and let the wind take the chaff away in the breeze while the heavier corn fell to the floor.
“Building the Barn perpendicular to the wind – along a north-south axis – funnelled the air through the thruff door and out through the large doorway opposite.”
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The Barn is packed with such surprise fascinations. For instance, in the 17th Century, so much tobacco was grown in Britain that it was threatening the profits of the American slave plantations and the amount of excise duty that the government was collecting. Therefore, in 1652, the British government banned the growing of tobacco “in any ground, field, place or places within this nation”. Officials even spread a rumour that tobacco didn’t grow well in British soil.
Despite this, 100 years later, a retired plantation worker from Virginia showed Ryedale farmers how to grow and cure tobacco ready for the pipe.
“The crops were a resounding success,” writes Sally, “but by 1782 had come to the attention of the authorities, who promptly publicly burned the entire lot, threw the farmers in prison and fined them the extraordinary sum of £30,000 (nearly £3m in today’s money).”
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As well as telling stories of the techniques and crops of the countryside, Sally tells of its people, including Mary Harker, who was born into a farming family at Asenby, near Thirsk, in 1768. From an early age, she was remarkably bright and unable to tell the truth. At 13, she became a rural domestic servant in Thirsk “but almost from the moment she arrived, Mary began a career of spectacular thievery, con artistry and, eventually, murder”.
After being run out of Thirsk, Mary went to Leeds, where she married and became a fortune teller and potion seller. “One of her better-known deceptions involved “The Prophet Hen”, a chicken she claimed laid magical eggs bearing the poorly spelled inscription ‘Crist is Coming’,” says Sally. “Credulous admirers would line up and pay to see the doomsday hen in action, not realising that Mary had etched the words on the eggs with acid and kept reinserting them up the poor hen’s oviduct.”
Mary’s other crimes included selling “health-giving” potions laced with arsenic and clearing out the victims’ houses immediately after their deaths.
On March 20, 1809, Mary – the “Yorkshire witch” – was hanged at York for murder. “By this point, she had become something of a celebrity,” says Sally. “Sensing there was some money to be made, the local infirmary charged visitors three pennies a head to see her corpse, which they subsequently flayed, tanned and sold as macabre souvenirs.”
The tip of her tongue went to the governor of Ripon jail, and until only a few years ago, the top half of her skeleton was on display in a medical museum in Leeds until only a few years ago.
Sally Coulthard is at Richmond Town Hall tonight (Friday, September 15) at 7.30pm as part of the Richmond Walking & Book Festival. Admission is £10, and she will be in conversation with Chris Lloyd, who compiles these notes. Go to booksandboots.org for further information. The Barn by Sally Coulthard is published by Head of Zeus for £10.99
On Wednesday (September 20) in Richmond Town Hall, Joanna Williams will be talking about her book, The Great Miss Lydia Becker: Suffragist, Scientist and Trailblazer, as part of the festival.
Lydia, from Manchester, was a botanist and an astronomer who founded the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1867, campaigning for women to get the Parliamentary vote.
For the next decade or so, she was on an almost continuous tour of the country, speaking at rallies and meetings. On at least two occasions, she spoke at well attended meetings in Darlington – in 1872, in the Mechanics Institute, and in 1874, in Central Hall.
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The D&S Times carried a long report of the meeting, which was chaired by the Darlington mayor, Henry Fell Pease, while its sister paper, The Northern Echo, said that “by her tact and humorous method of dealing with the subject, (she) rivetted the attention of the audience”.
Her touring was so relentless that it affected her health, and she died in 1890 in Geneva where she had gone in search of a better climate. In its obituary, the Echo said that “Miss Becker was a clear thinker and an effective platform speaker, and she occupied a foremost position as a champion of her sex”.
Tickets are £10. To book, and for more information about the festival, go to booksandboots.org.
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