REPORTS of bee boles are magnetically drawn to this column like bees to a honeypot, and so Rosemary Graham has kindly sent in a picture of the fine line of boles in West Scrafton in Coverdale.

Bee boles are south-facing recesses in walls in which skeps – the domed bee baskets – were placed so that bees had somewhere to live close to a source of nectar, and that was also convenient for humans to harvest their honey and wax.

The Northern Echo: The bee boles at West Scrafton. Picture courtesy of Rosemary Bateman

The bee boles at West Scrafton. Picture courtesy of Rosemary Bateman

The line of 12 bee boles at West Scrafton dates from the 19th Century and is in the garden wall of Culverham House.

The bee boles are a listed building – but then a third of the 40 or so stone-built houses in West Scrafton are listed. It also has a listed red telephone kiosk, dating from 1953, and, quite fabulously, it has a listed bink, dating from the 19th Century.

Please excuse as we contain our excitement as we have never encountered the word “bink” before.

A bink is a Scottish and northern English dialect word for a stone bench. Specifically, a bink is the kind of bench on which milk churns are placed. An ideal bink has a cool stone slab on which the churns stand, and is north-facing with a rear wall to protect them from the heat of the sun. The West Scrafton bink has a slate roof to keep the sun off.

There are binks scattered all over the place but, shamefully, we’d never previously given them any thought let alone compiled a mental map of their whereabouts. If you’ve got a bink near you, we’d love to hear from you – and, if you don’t call it a “bink”, what do you call it?

THE village of Barton, near Scotch Corner, specialises in curious street names. It has the Porch, the Ugly Porch and Kettle End, for instance, plus it has a patch of grass known as The Bink. Could this be where the village bink once was?

TALKING of curious names, a cyclist planning a ride round an A to Z of Yorkshire gets in touch. While there are lots of contenders for most of the letters, places beginning with Z are quite hard to come by, but near Bellerby, which is between Richmond and Leyburn, there is Zebra Hill.

It is just north of Bellerby on the road to Redmire.

How did it come by its name? There’s a suggestion that a travelling menagerie with all kinds of exotic beasts once stayed there and so zebras really were once seen on Zebra Hill. Please let us know if you can explain – we’d like to put the meaning in print because it would be good to see Zebra Hill in black and white.

Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk about binks, bee boles or zebras.

The Northern Echo: The centre of West Scrafton with the Manor House at the centre. Picture: Google StreetView

The centre of West Scrafton with the Manor House at the centre. Picture: Google StreetView

BACK to the bink at West Scrafton. It is beside the Manor House which is, of course, a Grade II listed building. The schedule says the Manor was built in the early 17th Century and it finishes: “The house is reputed to be the birthplace of Henry, Lord Darnley in 1545.”

Which is an amazing claim to fame.

Henry’s father, the Earl of Lennox, owned five granges in Coverdale and as he’d just had his Scottish estates confiscated, it is plausible that he was visiting West Scrafton when his wife, Margaret, gave birth to Henry.

The boy grew up at the family home of Temple Newsam in Leeds and, in order to reclaim the Scottish estates, headed to Scotland in his teenage years. There he met his first cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, and after a whirlwind romance, married her in 1565.

The Northern Echo: Mary, Queen of Scots with her second husband and cousin Henry Lord Darnley in about 1565

Mary, Queen of Scots with her second husband and cousin Henry Lord Darnley in about 1565

What a result! Not only had he got the Scottish estates back but he was now the king consort of Scotland.

However, he was a wrong ‘un. He loved the high life of women and drink.

Mary immediately realised the error of her ways and, with Henry out raucously cavorting while she was pregnant, she took increasing solace in the company of her private secretary, David Rizzio. Protestant Scottish nobles didn’t like the influence of the Catholic Italian advisor, and so told Henry the solace was of the saucy sort that no proper husband could allow.

So, on March 9, 1566, in front of Mary, Rizzio was dragged from the dining table of Holyrood House and stabbed 56 times. No one knows if Henry did the organising, the dragging or the stabbing, but his dagger was found in Rizzio’s mutilated body.

Her husband was clearly a major problem for Mary, but under Catholic law, she couldn’t divorce him, and if she annulled the marriage, her newborn son – probably fathered by Henry but possibly by Rizzio – would become illegitimate and so wouldn’t be able to inherit the throne.

So she appeared to forgive Henry. Even when he fell ill, riddled with syphilis, she took care of him, and allowed him to convalesce in Kirk O’Field, a house near Holyrood.

She even visited him there on the evening of February 9, 1567, to ascertain whether he was well enough to move back into her palace.

But a few hours later, at 2am, all Edinburgh was rocked by a terrific explosion. A huge quantity of gunpowder, which had somehow been secreted in the cellars, had gone off, blasting Kirk O’Field to smithereens.

Henry, and his two servants, were dead – but, strangely, not killed by the explosion. Henry’s body was found in a nightgown in the garden beneath a pear tree. He appeared to have been strangled, perhaps even hanged from the tree – there was an untouched chair nearby.

It was as if the explosion had been designed to destroy any evidence of a murder…

But Mary was free. She married the Earl of Boswell, who may well have secreted the gunpowder in the cellar, but by 1568 had become so unpopular that she was forced to flee to England where Elizabeth I held her prisoner for 18 years – including at Bolton Castle very close to West Scrafton – Elizabeth I beheaded her in 1587.

However, her son – probably fathered by Henry – became James IV of Scotland and then James I of England, so the royal family still today bears the genes of the chap who may have been born in the house which has a bink.