In the photo above, Breck House is that farmstead in the distance, over on the left, a small stone smudge against the great sweep of Bransdale. Easy to miss.
Breck House is a working farmhouse, built for function, not for show, in coursed sandstone with a pantiled roof and no airs about it whatsoever. It stands in upper Bransdale and was rebuilt after 1850, though the bones of something older linger inside. A boarded screen where a heck once stood. A recess that once held a spice cupboard. Little clues, easily missed, like the house itself from a distance.
Before that rebuild, the place was simpler still. A 1782 survey shows it as a plain east-west range, nothing more, owned then by a man named John Brown. The farm, some 122 acres of it, was known as Breck, or sometimes Birk, House, and it kept its own name and its own owner for decades before the great Duncombe and Feversham estate finally swallowed it up, sometime between 1814 and 18261Farmhouse, Breck House, Bransdale. Record ID: 31314 / MNA145439. National Trust Heritage Records Online. https://heritagerecords.nationaltrust.org.uk/HBSMR/MonRecord.aspx?uid=MNA145439.
By 1851 the tenant was Robert Norris, and the census of that year has him living at the farm with his wife, a son, a grandson, and one servant. Not a full house, by the standards of lonely moorland farmsteads. What became of the place after Norris died is not entirely clear. The estate seems to have taken it back in hand rather than pass it swiftly to another tenant, which is the sort of quiet administrative fade-out that history rarely bothers to record properly.
In hunting for some scrap of a story about either Norris or Brown, I found next to nothing. But I did stumble upon this, which I offer here purely because it seems a shame to leave it in the cyber cloud. I have not been able to work out exactly where “Bransdale End” was, though it seems a fair bet it sat at this end of the dale, not far from Breck House itself perhaps.
Transcript from the Yorkshire Gazette, 25 January 1840, Page 5:
Marriages
Lately, at Kirkdale, in the winter of life, Mr. John Weighel, of Pennyholme, who has for the last seventy years stood the piercing blasts of Bransdale End, to Mrs Jane Sharp, who has for nearly the same period experienced the still more bitter storms from Rowpah Top. The bride was borne to the church on her favourite white ass, who has for the last twenty-five years eaten at her own crib and been fed by her hand; and what rendered the scene more novel was, her solicitor was in attendance at the church-yard with a marriage settlement, to secure to her own offspring at her decease the hard-wrought earnings of her former years, which caused delay in the proceedings, that time had nearly told the prescribed limits for the solemnization matrimony ere the nuptial ceremony was completed.
Two people, well into their seventies, marrying under the shadow of the church tower, one arriving on a donkey that had outlasted most friendships. A solicitor hovering by the gravestones with paperwork, because love is one thing and inheritance is quite another. It very nearly did not happen in time. It is a small, strange, wonderful notice, tucked away in a newspaper column nearly two hundred years old, and it tells you more about life in Bransdale than any survey of joists and lintels ever could.
- 1Farmhouse, Breck House, Bransdale. Record ID: 31314 / MNA145439. National Trust Heritage Records Online. https://heritagerecords.nationaltrust.org.uk/HBSMR/MonRecord.aspx?uid=MNA145439 ↩︎
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