A Boundary Stone of 1860 and a Chaloner Legacy

A one-way walk to Guisborough—infinitely preferable than a circular route. Today’s image features Highcliff Nab, seen from just below Black Nab across the fields of Codhill Farm—or Highcliffe Farm, depending on whom you wish to offend. One must name both or risk mild social unrest. The boundary stone, engraved “T.C. G 1860,” of course refers to Admiral Thomas Chaloner, who spent his time as Lord of the Manor of Gisborough marking borders and reminding everyone it was his land, thank you very much.¹NYMNPA HER No: 17958 Line of boundary stones marking former Guisborough-Hutton Lowcross boundary The year marks one of his legally mandated strolls around said land, presumably to stretch his legs and assert dominion.

Just beyond this, one finds “The Race,” an 18th-century leat, barely visible on the right at the edge of the Bracken.²NYMNPA HER No: 17963 The Mill Race It was part of some grand plan to steal water from the Esk side of the moor—sorry, redirect it—to keep Robert Chaloner’s mills in Guisborough happily spinning. Unsurprisingly, the mill owners downstream in the Esk valley objected to this theft of nature. They accused Chaloner of pinching their water, which he likely did with a straight face and a fine hat. This very ditch was probably the scene of that watery crime.

The Race did not stop being troublesome. Fast forward to 1860 and yet another spat, this time between Thomas Chaloner and one Joseph Whitwell Pease, the iron baron who had bought up rights to mine both Hutton Common and Codhill. Then, probably due to Chaloner’s boundary-obsessed perambulations in 1859, things unravelled. Chaloner maintained the true boundary between the manors of Hutton and Guisborough was along The Race. Naturally.

Both commoners used it for sheep-washing and the like, and apparently everyone had agreed this was the boundary. The leat was maintained either by Codhill Farm or by whichever unfortunate souls worked at Chaloner’s mill.

Pease’s Codhill royalty only extended to that dry-stone wall surrounding the intake fields, but his Hutton royalty thus ended at The Race. Therefore, Chaloner laid claim to the narrow strip between the two, all of a few metres wide. Little was made of the fact that the wall had been deliberately set back from The Race to avoid it collapsing in times of flood.

Obviously, what Chaloner really had his eye on was the ironstone lurking beneath it. As part-owner of the mining operation, he must have thought: why not squeeze a bit more out of it? Pease, left with his holdings inconveniently non-contiguous, no doubt raged privately.

Legal wrangling ensued. Chaloner won. Pease paid. Money begets money. No one was surprised.

Source

“Guisborough Before 1900”. Edited by B.J.D. Harrison and G. Dixon. 1982.

Dixon, Grace. “Two Ancient Townships – Studies of Pinchinthorpe and Hutton Lowcross”.

• 1
  NYMNPA HER No: 17958 Line of boundary stones marking former Guisborough-Hutton Lowcross boundary
• 2
  NYMNPA HER No: 17963 The Mill Race