Out & About …

… on the North York Moors, or wherever I happen to be.

Aireyholme

Aireyholme

An earlyish start for a walk back home from Pinchinthorpe and once again, setting out in the dull and gloom and thick cloud. Almost home and out pops a sunbeam, a phenomenon which in naval slang would have been termed a ‘Jacob’s Ladder‘.

And the sun shone on Aireyholme Farm, and the fields south and east of Roseberry Topping. It’s a mixed farm of 500 acres, roughly half arable and half pasture, and one of the biggest farms in the parish of Great Ayton.

Aireyholme was listed in the Domesday Book as a settlement called ‘Ergun’ meaning a summer pasture. It was one of seven manors in what is now the Parish of Great Ayton. The returns indicate that these seven manors were under cultivated and sparsely populated, one even listed as ‘waste’  This was probably because 17 years earlier, William the Conqueror had carried out his ‘scorched earth’ policy by his harrying of the North and the population had not yet recovered.

By the middle ages, Aireyholme was part of Ayton’s common land where villagers had rights to pasture their animals. In the mid-17th-century, these rights were extinguished when the open fields and commons were enclosed and Aireyholme became owned by the Lord of the Manor, John Coulson. It was he who probably built the existing farmhouse, although it will have been variously extended and added to over the years.

A century later, Thomas Skottowe had succeeded to the Lord of the Manor, and it was Skottowe who employed James Cook’s father as bailiff or ‘hind’ on his farm at Aireyholme. It seems unlikely that the Cook family actually lived down there on the farm but the opinion is the Cook family home was in a small tied cottage very close by to where I was standing when I took this photo. It is said that Thomas Skottowe paid for the young James to go to school in Great Ayton. After leaving school, he worked on the farm for a few more years until aged about sixteen, he left to become a grocer’s apprentice in Staithes. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I wonder if he ever used the phrase ‘Jacob’s Ladder’.

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