Has anyone seen the ghost of Stephen Hollin . . . and lived?

3:04pm Wednesday 25th November 2009

By Chris Lloyd

The luckless Stephen Hollin was murdered by his nephews. Chris Lloyd knuckles down and goes in search of a ghost, and the answer to an ancient mystery that is ‘wrapped in obscurity’.

AROUND a lonely farmhouse called Cawd Knuckles, amid wild carrs and wet moors on a dark, storm-tossed night, the ghost of Stephen Hollin is said to walk.

He was murdered by his two nephews, for “motives of cupidity”, so long ago that no one quite knows when.

Even 125 years ago, his violent demise was “wrapped in obscurity”, although there were still those alive who had encountered his ghost.

And, gathered around the fire in Manfield’s blacksmith’s shop, they told a blood-curdling tale of the farmhand from Blenkholme who was the victim of the ghost.

Late one autumn evening, the farmhand dropped into the blacksmiths to get some “plough cowters” sharpened (this story is so old that even the word “cowters” has lost its meaning). The parliament around the fire told the boy of the dangers of passing through Stephen’s territory at that time of night.

This is how they spoke in the rural villages, like Manfield, south of Darlington, in days of yore.

Next morning, the body of the farmhand was found “all scratched and torn, as if he had been trailed over fields, and through hedges all night”.

Stephen got the blame, even though he was generally regarded as a benign ghost. At Cawd Knuckles, he would catch runaway horses, he would help with the threshing of the corn and he would assist the young milkmaid carrying her great “skeelfull” of milk.

But he had a pesky side to him. He would roll cheeses downstairs. Once he hid a new-born calf high in the “rigging tree” outside the farmhouse. On another occasion he stole all the thread from a visiting tailor.

Manfield villagers tired of such tricks, and of unsettling encounters with Stephen in his favourite haunt, Coddisher Lonnin (Cottagers Lane), which to this day leads to a farmhouse at Grunton.

They called a priest, who exorcised the apparition for a stipulated number of years.

“The ‘conjuring’ was successful,” said an unnamed correspondent in the Darlington and Stockton Times, in 1883, “but as the time is just expiring, we may hope to see this famous ghost in our midst again before long.”

■ ECHO Memories promised a return to Manfield a fortnight ago when it got its Roman roads in a mix.

MANY people have mentioned the murder of Ellen Mulholland in North Terrace, Shildon, in 1905, as reported here a month ago. A couple of her descendants have been in touch (see the Memories blog) to say how the family never spoke of the day she was killed by her nephew, James Garrigan, who then turned the rifle on himself.

Later generations found out only by family tree research. “Before asking ‘Who do you think you are?’ it is worth asking ‘do I really want to know?’,” says one of her relatives.

A study of maps of Shildon from Ellen’s day shows that a railway line ran up Cheapside, clattering past the terraced houses, into a siding at the rear of North Terrace.

This was the Black Boy Branchline, which opened on July 10, 1827. It branched off the Stockton and Darlington Railway near the coal drops in the Locomotion museum, and climbed Shildon’s famous limestone ridge to High Shildon.

Horses did the bulk of the pulling of the wagons because, in those early days, they were cheaper and more reliable than the newfangled steam engines. At Locomotion you can still see the tumbledown Black Boy Stables and, next to them, the Bank Riders’ Cabin. The bank riders rode on the wagon and applied the brake – a wooden jemmy pushed against the moving wheels – on the downhill section.

In High Shildon, the Black Boy line joined Cheapside – the street where the cheape or traders in the nearby Market Place lived.

As it climbed higher it passed Foundry and Phoenix streets, with a siding into the rear of North Terrace. This siding supplied Nicholas Downing’s Phoenix Foundry, which specialised in iron and brass work.

Because the peak of the bank was so steep, in 1828 a stationary engine was installed at the top near North Terrace. The engine turned a drum which wound up the rope attached to the wagons, thus pulling them up the hill.

The men who manned the engine lived beside it in Rose Cottages, a terrace of three low houses identified as railway property by the prominent G12 plate under their eaves.

Once over the top, gravity took the wagons down Eldon Bank into the Dene Valley.

This must have been great fun for the horses as, having pulled the wagons up the hill, they were untethered and led to a dandy cart at the back of the train. They stepped into the dandy cart, a bag of hay waiting for them, and rode down the bank with the bank riders regulating the speed.

At the bottom, though, the horses had to get out and pull the full wagons back up the hill.

A network of little lines ran from the Black Boy Branchline across the Dene Valley, collecting coal from all the shafts. Many of the shafts were connected to the Black Boy Colliery, and so the branchline got its name.

The colliery started in the early 1700s and, predictably, the small boys who scrabbled about in the coal seams fetching out the coal re-emerged covered in black dust.

On January 10, 1842, the Shildon Tunnel opened directly beneath the Black Boy Branchline. Now fast locomotives could nip through the limestone ridge, collect long trains of coal and speed them away to market while the horses on the Black Boy trudged up the incline hauling only a couple of wagons each.

The tunnel should have killed off the Black Boy, but for some reason the line survived. No one seems to know the date when it shut, but Ellen Mulholland would have been aware of it going past her back door in the early 20th Century.

THE course of the Black Boy Branchline is marked by a chaldron wagon at the bottom of Cheapside. A chaldron was a measure of dry volume, in use since the 13th Century.

Different parts of the country developed different sizes of chaldrons – the Newcastle chaldron, for example, was about twice the size of a London chaldron. It was standardised as 36 bushels, but the easiest way of thinking about it is that you can get one chaldron of coal in a chaldron wagon.

These seem to have been affixed between 1856 and 1860, just in case a house managed to get lost somehow. There was always a letter followed by a number: G9 is Timothy Hackworth’s house, H1 is the engineman’s at Brusselton, and G12 is the Black Boy enginemen’s house.

■ DARLINGTON Civic Trust is holding a heritage exhibition at the Friends Meeting House in Skinnergate on November 28, from 10am to 12.30.

All the voluntary groups in the town that are working to preserve buildings and history have been invited to display their work, and all members of the public are invited to drop in and have a look.