Hidden deep in a dark conifer plantation, where Goldcrests tweet high among the needles — or so I was told, an old man’s hearing failing to pick up the high frequencies — lies the forgotten farmstead of High Hazel Heads. Few come here now, and fewer still would guess that beneath these trees once lay a thriving patch of North Yorkshire rural life.
Long before the forest took root, the land was open and worked. From the records gathered by Bill Cowley for his booklet “Snilesworth”, we can trace the people who once called this place home1Snilesworth by Bill Cowley (Turker Books) 1993 ISBN 0 9518529 1 4. In 1851, the census names Joseph Bell at “Hessle Woods”, almost certainly here. A decade later, John Kettlewood, aged forty-four, farmed 106 acres with his wife, six children, and three labourers. By 1871, the land had passed to a younger pair, John and Amelia Watson, brother and sister, tending 80 acres between them. Isaac Bentley followed in 1891, and for another half-century the ploughs turned until, around 1947, the last tenant, Milner, abandoned the holding and left for Long Acres Farm near Hawnby.
Now only fragments remain. Moss carpets the collapsed dry-stone walls, ferns root where cattle once grazed, and the outlines of fields are ghosted beneath the forest floor. Yet something of those lives lingers. The soil remembers the tread of boots and hooves; the paths still thread the same slopes and beck sides.
Though these folk were not my ancestors, the pull of places like this endures. The people may have faded, but it is the land that binds us — through its features, its silences, and its stubborn continuity. To stand here, among the ruins and beneath the pines is to feel the past not as an all enveloping presence but as a story waiting patiently to be told.
- 1Snilesworth by Bill Cowley (Turker Books) 1993 ISBN 0 9518529 1 4
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