At home on Eleanor's estate

KIRKBRIDGE is a hamlet which is exactly as its name suggests: a church next to a bridge.

Not any old church, though. This is an ancient church where a dowager duchess chose to be buried rather than in her family vault in Westminster Abbey.

And it is not any old bridge – it is a small stone one over a meandering watercourse with a delightful name: it is Mary Wilde’s Beck.

A third building completes Kirkbridge: a three storey, 12-bedroom house that is quite difficult to overlook. Yet somehow we managed to. In Memories 242, a picture of it was a mystery to us. “Please help,” we said. “Despite the enormity of the house, we don’t recognise it...”

STANWICK CHURCH: Dedicated to St John the Baptist, it was built inside Queen Cartimandua's fort

Plenty of other people did, though, and we thank everyone who has got in touch. Some of our informants called the house Kirkbridge; others called it Stanwick Old Hall.

Kirkbridge is at the entrance to the small village of Stanwick St John, to the south-west of Darlington. The fields that surround it contain six miles of grassy mounds which are the remains of an Iron Age fort that may well have been the home of Cartmandua, the queen of the Brigantes tribe.

Around AD43, Cartmandua concluded a peace deal with the invading Romans. They rewarded her with great wealth and allowed her people to live unhindered.

Her husband, Venutius, was not so happy, though. This was partly because he regarded the deal with the Romans as treachery, and partly because Cartmandua had replaced him in her bed with Vellocatus, who had been Venutius’ armour-bearer.

The embittered estranged husband attacked Cartmandua in her well-defended fort at Stanwick. The Romans sent centurions to see him off, but after 20 years of civil war, Venutius seems to have been victorious. Cartmandua disappears from history in about AD69 and Venutius briefly claimed the crown of the Brigantes – until the Romans saw him off and introduced direct rule to his tribespeople.

If grassy mounds could talk, the ones at Stanwick would have some great stories to tell.

The church at Kirkbridge grew up inside the fortification – it could be that it was built on a spot that was sacred to Cartmandua herself.

STANWICK CAMP: Two boys in November 1960 exploring the remains of the Brigantes' fort

By 1400, the area was owned by the Catterick family who built their hall opposite the church – this is the beginnings of the building that featured in our mystery picture. The antiquary John Leland, who toured the country collecting local history in the mid 16th Century, wrote: “Mr Keterick dwellith at Stanewiche having a preaty place.” Spelling was a little different in those days.

The Cattericks, though, were committed to Catholicism, even when the country became Protestant. They were fined so heavily for their crime of faith that they became bankrupt, and in 1638, they had to sell their Stanwick estate for £4,000 to Hugh Smithson, a highly successful haberdasher from London – his grandfather may originally have come from the Stanwick area.

Smithson was a royalist who supported King Charles I during the Civil War that erupted immediately after he acquired his Stanwick estate. Charles I lost his head, but when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he rewarded Smithson by making him Sir Hugh.

KIRKBRIDGE TODAY: Once home to the Catterick and Smithson families, the house at Stanwick may date as far back as 1400. Picture: Emma Johnson

When Sir Hugh died in 1688, following the fashion of the day which showed how knightly he was, a helmet and a pair of gauntlets was placed on his coffin. The undertaker seems to have acquired these items as a job lot because they wouldn’t have been much use to Sir Hugh had he ever worn them into battle – the gauntlets were both left handed.

Sir Hugh’s grandson was also called Sir Hugh. He appreciated the fine things in life – in 1733, he went on a grand tour of Europe and returned from Venice with two large Canaletto paintings which he hung on the walls of Kirkbridge.

In 1740, Sir Hugh made the perfect match: he married Lady Elizabeth, the sole heiress of the Earl of Northumberland of Alnwick Castle.

The Smithsons were going up in the world – although if Sir Hugh wanted to inherit his father-in-law’s riches, he would have to ditch his own surname and become a Percy. This he did.

To show how much the Smithsons were going up in the world, Sir Hugh needed a suitably ostentatious new mansion rather than the Cattericks’ old manor house at Kirkbridge.

OLD MANOR: An engraving of Kirkbridge, the first manor house at Stanwick

So he built a new bridge over Mary Wilde’s Beck, swept away the hovels in which the peasants of Stanwick lived and constructed a magnificent mansion, probably to his own design, and complete with deerpark.

When Lady Elizabeth’s father died in 1750, Sir Hugh became Earl of Northumberland and went to live at Alnwick, keeping the new hall at Stanwick as his country retreat. He became one of the most influential men in the kingdom under George III, occupying such positions as Lord of the Bedchamber, Lord Chamberlain to Queen Charlotte, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Master of the Horse. In 1766, the king moved him to the top of the social scale by making him the 1st Duke of Northumberland.

Sir Hugh’s heir was, rather boringly, another Sir Hugh, who became the 2nd Duke of Northumberland. However, his illegitimate son James Smithson was far more interesting.

James’ mother was a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Macie, whom Sir Hugh was seeing for many years. When it became obvious that she was swelling with child, she discreetly decamped to Paris, where the baby was named Jacques-Louis Macie. However, when he came of age, he came to England and took his father’s surname. He became a well-regarded scientist, specialising in minerals – smithsonite is named after him – and he inherited his mother’s fortune.

He died unmarried in Genoa in 1829, and left his huge fortune – said to be $500,000 – to the American government. This was a huge leap of faith, but having seen the ideals of the French revolution crushed and having been held prisoner by the Prussians, he wasn’t particularly keen on Europe and had high hopes for the fledgling United States. He instructed that his fortune should be used “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”, which led to the creation of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. The Smithsonian now has 138 million items, is the largest museum in the world, and American scholars fairly often arrive in Stanwick to see where their institute began.

Back to the legitimate line. Another Sir Hugh became the 3rd Duke of Northumberland and lived at Alnwick, so his younger brother, Algernon, got to occupy Stanwick. However, he was rarely there as he preferred to live it up in London and other great European cities.

In 1841, when he was 49, he married 21-year-old Lady Eleanor Grosvenor. Because of the age gap, it was an eyebrow-raising marriage, but they seem to have been well suited, and Stanwick became their base.

DOWAGER DUCHESS: Lady Eleanor (1820-1911), who lived as a widow for 46 years at the new hall at Stanwick

They had good genealogical fortune. Lady Eleanor’s wealthy relatives died and she inherited their estates and then in 1847, when the 3rd Duke of Northumberland died without any children, Algernon rather unexpectedly became the 4th Duke, and one of the wealthiest aristocrats in the land. He and Eleanor moved to Alnwick Castle, where the locals came to know him as “Algernon the Good” because he was so kind to them.

In 1865, Algernon died, plunging 44-year-old Lady Eleanor into mourning. The new duke wanted her out of Alnwick so, 150 years ago this month, a special train stopped for her at Darlington’s Bank Top station. She got off and, dressed in the deepest weeds, was driven to Stanwick where all her tenants silently waited for her.

The Dowager Duchess lived at the new hall for 46 years, immersing herself in the life of the villages of Aldbrough, Stanwick and Forcett. She died in 1911, and was buried locally rather than in the Percys’ vault in Westminster.

In 1922, the family sold Stanwick. Eleanor’s hall was by now almost derelict, and its stone was carted off for road-building. Some of its items remain – a column in Gainford; windows in Gainford village hall; an elaborate iron gate in the west end of Darlington, a fountain on Cockerton green and wooden panelling in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

So the new hall was gone, but the old hall – the one at Kirkbridge that we failed to recognise – remained.

“My grandfather, Hugh Johnson, bought it in 1922 when the estate was sold,” says Mike Johnson, who still lives there with his wife, Pauline. “He came from Cowling, near Bedale, and had made his money felling timber and leading it to the sawmills. It is said he walked his cattle up the A1 from Bedale one Saturday afternoon when he bought this house.

“I remember him when I was a child – he would sit with a little bit of coal on the fire in his dressing gown to keep warm. He never spent a penny on himself.”

But he was an astute businessman – as well as the house at Kirkbridge and its surrounding 400-acre farm, he owned two shops in Darlington’s Tubwell Row and a hotel in Blackpool. “He bought that in partnership with his bank manager when it went into liquidation,” says Mike.

And so Kirkbridge survives beside the church and the bridge over Mary Wilde’s Beck. Steeped in centuries of history, it really is a splendid place that should not be missed by anybody.

But who was Mary Wilde? If only we knew...

With particular thanks to Emma Johnson and Ali Bell. Thanks also to everyone who got in touch regarding the pictures from the Stanwick and Cockerton areas – more in future weeks