AS you venture down the bank north out of Richmond towards Gilling West, you are confronted by an attention-grabbing triumphal arch with huge iron gates dedicated to Voltigeur, the horse which won the 1850 Derby and caused celebrations so all-consuming that a score of men drank themselves to death.

The Northern Echo: The Voltigeur Arch on the road between Richmond and Gilling West

The Voltigeur Arch on the road between Richmond and Gilling West

We drained every last drop out of that story last week, but the real reason we were going down the steep hill to Holmedale was a search for St Osythe.

Because next to the Voltigeur Arch is a track which leads to St Osythe Farm. These days, Osythe is an unusual name, although in centuries gone by, it was surprisingly common.

Osythe was a 7th Century girl from East Anglia who drowned in a beck but was miraculously revived after nuns spent three days praying for her. She married Frithewald, king of the East Saxons, but one day when he was out hunting, she ran away and joined a nunnery.

In AD653, her nunnery was attacked by Viking invaders. She came out to plead with them to behave but instead they sliced off her head. Where it fell to the ground, a holy spring of water miraculously sprung forth and, even more miraculously, she picked up her head, popped it under her arm and walked back to her nunnery.

Once inside the doors, she collapsed and died.

The Northern Echo: St Osyth Priory, near Clacton in Essex, and St Osythe's Farm, near Richmond, are named after the same Anglo Saxon saint

St Osyth Priory, near Clacton in Essex, and St Osythe's Farm, near Richmond, are named after the same Anglo Saxon saint

Her institution, St Osyth Priory, still stands near Clacton in Essex, where she also has a beach named after her. A spring on the Aske estate near Richmond was also dedicated to her, hence the name of the farm.

Why? No one knows, but the churches at Great Smeaton and Scruton are also dedicated to obscure saints, St Eloy and St Radegund, with no obvious local connections. Perhaps a soldier, far from home, prayed for a safe return, and when he made it back to North Yorkshire he was so grateful that he told everyone of the saints he had been praying to on his travels.

But it was not only in Richmond that the story of St Osythe (with or without a final e) had resonance.

Catherine Ryan’s lovely blog about the people of Teesdale, called bygone-teesdale-folk.org.uk, tells how more than 100 women in the Cotherstone and Romaldkirk area were baptised with variations of the name Osythe between the 16th and 19th Centuries.

The first was Sethe Jackson in 1579, and the last may well have been Sithy Ann Patterson, who hailed from Bowes and died in West Auckland in 1917.

Over the centuries in Teesdale, there were women called Sythe, Scythy, Scithe, Scithia and Scytha, although the most common form was Sythy. Is there anyone still living called Sythy, or something similar derived from Osythe?

One Sythy that Catherine’s blog talks about is Sythy Bourne, from Cotherstone, who, around 1774, married Thomas Binks of Bowes, and went to live with him on his remote farm of Stoney Keld.

They called their first son, born in 1775, Thomas and so when a daughter came along in 1779, it was only fair to call her Sythy. Sadly, this Sythy only lived until she was three.

Her brother Thomas had a colourful life. He became surveyor of taxes in Stockton, but regularly got himself into such serious debt that he was imprisoned. His creditors seem to have chased him from London to Edinburgh, often looking in at Stoney Keld, as he went by a variety of names: Thomas Barrett Binks, Thomas B Binks and Thomas Bingo Binks.

Indeed, such was the enormity of his debts that in 1836, the family farm at Stoney Keld had to be sold for £3,980 – that’s worth about £465,000 in today’s values, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator.

Even if it cleared Thomas’ debts, it didn’t do him much good because he died in Edinburgh of tuberculosis in 1837 – Catherine wonders whether he had caught TB while incarcerated in a debtors’ prison.

This must have caused his mother, Sythy, great heartache. Having been a widow for 43 years, she died in her 90s in 1839, and was buried in the Binks family tomb in Bowes churchyard.

The Northern Echo: Bowes churchyard, where there is a tomb dedicated to the Binks family of Stoney Keld. Two of the Binks women were called Sythy

Bowes churchyard, where there is a tomb dedicated to the Binks family of Stoney Keld. Two of the Binks women were called Sythy

WITH no family farm to inherit, Thomas Binks’ sons, Thomas and Richard had to make their own way in the world so they joined the East India Company. Richard made it home safely and lived out his days in Darlington, but Thomas, a gunner in the Bengal Fort Artillery, died in Dum Dum near Calcutta (now Kolkata) of “Dum Dum fever”, which we’d now recognise as malaria. He too is mentioned on the Binks memorial in Bowes churchyard.

The Northern Echo: The rear left side of the hull of the tank. This includes the toothed rear drive sprocket wheel (foreground), bogie suspension with two of the six rubber tyred road wheels, top rollers, length of track and twisted/torn track guard above

A tank on Cotherstone Moor, photographed by Dave Middlemas, which is a leftover from when Stoney Keld and the surrounding moor was used as a Second World War store for noxious gases

STONEY KELD, on the moors between Cotherstone and Bowes, featured in these columns in January when a ruined Second World War tank, stuck in a bog, was drawn to our attention.

During the war, Stoney Keld’s remote land became RAF Bowes Moor, where mustard gas, phosgene and lewisite were stored. At the end of the war, large quantities of the chemicals were destroyed up there.

THE surname Binks will not have escaped the attention of regular readers because for weeks we have been scouring the countryside – you could say from Bowes to Kolkata – in search of “binks”.

A “bink” was a Yorkshire and Durham dialect word for a stone bench, often with a sink attached, directly outside a cottage door on which a milk churn was placed so that the housewife could make butter or cheese.

The word “bink” has also been applied to milk stands, which are the stone platforms built at farm gates for churns to be placed on ready for collection.

There remain binks and milk stands all over the place. Staying out in Teesdale, when Selset Reservoir flooded part of Lunedale in the 1950s, Bink House, the home of the Walton family, was one of six farmsteads that was submerged.

Nick Whelan of Romanby, though, takes us to Hornby by kindly sending in two pictures taken by his late father, Tony, during the winter of 1963 shortly after the family had moved into the village. They show snow-topped binks.

The Northern Echo: The wooden bink, or milk stand, at Hornby during the winter of 1963

The wooden bink, or milk stand, at Hornby during the winter of 1963

That’s Hornby in Hambletonshire which is near Great Smeaton and should not be confused with the Hornby in Richmondshire which is near Bedale. Both villages probably get their names from a similar source – they are the “by”, or settlement, of a Norseman called Horni – but that is by the by.

The Wikipedia page for Hornby in Hambletonshire says: “The village has very few amenities. There is a small church, a telephone box and a post box. The pub is called the Grange Arms.”

The Northern Echo: The bink at the western entrance to Hornby, in Hambleton, in 1963. Trees now obscure the houses on the right and the home on the left has been painted white, but the telephone box remains - although not the bink

The bink at the western entrance to Hornby, in Hambleton, in 1963. Trees now obscure the houses on the right and the home on the left has been painted white, but the telephone box remains - although not the bink

Since the entry was written, the amenities have become even fewer as the church has been converted into a residence.

But once Hornby had two binks.

One of the binks looks a very shonky, wooden affair, but the other, at the western end of the village near the phone box, looks much more substantial.

Neither of Hornby’s binks survives.

The Northern Echo: Tom Peacock and the Cuckoo Hill View "bink", as the local children called it, in Reeth

Tom Peacock and the Cuckoo Hill View "bink", as the local children called it, in Reeth

CUCKOO HILL VIEW looks across the green at Reeth towards Cuckoo Hill, which is below Fremington Edge and which is where, about 10 years ago, Looking Back last heard a cuckoo.

There’s now an ice cream parlour in Cuckoo Hill View and, more importantly, a bink.

Only it’s really a horse mounting block, attached to the Old Temperance Bookshop. The bookshop was built about 275 years ago as a hotel, so perhaps it was provided for the guests to soberly climb onto their horses.

But Tom Peacock, 90, reports that when he was a lad – his father had Peacock’s butchers at the foot of the green – it was always known as “the bink” and his wife, Patricia, who also grew up in Reeth, says “I’ll meet you at the bink” was how children arranged their social lives.

The mounting block is probably the same height as a bink and so there is no reason why milk churns couldn’t once have been placed on there.