Where did highwaymen hide out during the golden age of roadside robbery, and did Dick Turpin ever make his hang-out in a inn on the edge of Darlington?

These, any many other questions, spring to mind following our articles on Ravensford, a farm which is in a concealed fold of the countryside to the south of Hamsterley, just off the A68.

Because several readers have contacted us to say that in this concealed fold Dick Turpin would lie low, and one even suggested that the notorious highwayman's ghost still walks there. Can it be true?

Ravensford farm, near Hamsterley, was derelict for many decades until it was done up in the 1980s, and now it looks like... The golden age of highwaymen was from the end of the Civil War in the mid 17th Century, after which there were lots of ex-soldiers with equestrian skills and weapons, until the late 18th Century when traffic increased on the new turnpike roads which eliminated many hiding places.

Noel Fielding as Dick Turpin in The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick TurpinThe majority of Turpin’s crimes were committed in Essex, Lincolnshire and the East Riding so he may not have had much call to operate from a darkest Durham hide-out.

But there are so many myths about highwaymen it is difficult to tell. Just as it takes a village to raise a child so it takes a community to support a highwayman – he, or occasionally she, needed accomplices, needed food for his horse, needed fences of his stolen goods, needed hidey-holes where landlords turned a blind eye. In the myths, the dandy highwaymen are portrayed as working class heroes, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor – but that’s often because they were paying hush money to the people who keeping them hidden.

The Baydale Beck Inn, looking east into Darlington, before 1910 when the road was widened and it was knocked down and rebuiltThere is an oft-repeated myth that Turpin regularly stayed at the Baydale Beck Inn on the western outskirts of Darlington. His room was said to have had five doors in case he ever needed to make a hasty exit.

This story also says that Turpin, on the run in Yorkshire and using the alias “John Palmer”, stayed at the Baydale on the night of October 1, 1738. He rode at dawn on October 2, and was arrested later that day at Beverley in the East Riding which led to him being hanged in York on April 7, 1739.

The Baydale Beck as it looks today: did Dick Turpin ever hideaway here?But Turpin has come to represent all that was bold and daring about highwaymen.

For instance, he is renowned for robbing a man at Rochester in Kent and riding 200 miles to York, where he engaged the Lord Mayor in a bet over a game of bowls. He was arrested the following day but produced the Lord Mayor as an alibi as everyone knew that it was impossible to be in Rochester and York on the same day.

Yet this feat was probably performed by another highwayman, John Nevison, nicknamed “Swift Nick” by Charles II because of his ability to make high speed escapes. Nevison was known as the Yorkshire Robin Hood, although whether the 15 butchers he and 20 accomplices robbed in 1674 on their way to Northallerton fair thought so is doubtful.

He was hanged at York in 1684 having shot and killed a constable who tried to arrest him.

Chivalrous Claude Duval making advances to a female passenger while his gun-toting accomplices rob the carriage. In the distance, a couple of failed highwaymen hangThe most romantic of highwaymen was Claude Duval, a Frenchman who chivalrously robbed his victims, even dancing with their wives before making off into the night. He was executed in London in 1670, and buried in Covent Garden beneath a stone which reputedly said: “Here lies DuVall: Reader, if male thou art, look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart. Much havoc has he made of both; for all men he made to stand, and women he made to fall.”

Most highwaymen operated on the rich roads leading to London – the Great North Road south from York provided rich pickings for the big names like Turpin.

But there were local highwaymen, as well.

In the 1660s, the Bishop of Durham, John Cosin, wrote about how one of his men had had a close shave when fording the Tees south of Darlington.

“He named Barwick, for one, a famous thief, with others in his company, besides one Middleton and one Copperthwaite, who laid at Neasham for their prey, and that he was put to ride full speed for four miles together to escape them in their pursuit of him,” wrote the bishop.

The A67 being relaid outside the Baydale Beck Inn on January 20, 1962Similarly, it was probably a local highwayman, rather than the famous Dick Turpin, who made the Baydale Beck his base. There are stories of Catton’s gang, “a celebrated clatch of thieves”, being based there, and their leader was “Sir” William Browne who may have used the room with five doors.

This self-styled knight of the realm was actually, like practically all highwaymen, a violent criminal. In 1741, he was convicted by Durham Assizes of breaking into a barn and transported.

However, he quickly came back, and on August 8, 1743, he was executed at Westgate, Newcastle, for returning. He was despatched very shortly after his trial because the authorities feared members of Catton’s gang would try and spring him from jail.

So if there were a highwayman who used Ravensford as a hideaway – and it is conveniently close to what is now the A68 – it was probably one of these local ruffians.

A RECENT, respected BBC history podcast says that the word “hangover” comes about because people viewed a hanging as a lively public entertainment during which they drank too much, leaving them with the after effects of a hanging the following morning.

It is true that the execution of highwaymen, the most popular of criminals, drew huge crowds. When Jack Sheppard was hanged on November 16, 1724, in London, 200,000 people – a third of the capital’s population – turned out to watch and buy the pamphlets that celebrated his four daring escapes from prison in a year.

A carnival atmosphere, with plenty of drinking, saw his demise and the mob then stormed the gallows and made off with his dead body, so it is likely that plenty of them had a hangover after the hanging.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary is in fact American slang that didn’t enter usage until 1894 – long after the golden age of highwaymen had ended – and it just means “after-effects”. So the derivation that connects it with highwaymen is an urban myth, just like many of the stories of their daring-do.

Dick Turpin next to his grave in St George's, York. However, the headstone is a fake - there is no evidence of it existing before 1918