- The Older Work Under the March
- The Four Kinds
- The Church Ruins
- The Deep Ruins
- Who Claims Them
- Reading a Ruin Before Entering It
“There is a drain under Harrowgate market that was cut before the ruin years and it takes the whole town’s water still. The corporation has never repaired it because the corporation has never needed to. That is the honest measure of the old world and it is under our feet on market day.”
The Older Work Under the March
“Every road in this county follows an older road. Every bridge stands on older piers. The priory church has a crypt nobody built and the priory did not cut the well it drinks from. We are tenants and we forget it because the landlord has been dead a long while.”
The march is full of older work and most of it is not ruined in any sense a visitor would recognise, which is the first thing to establish. The northern road runs on a made bed that nobody in the record laid and that has never needed relaying. The Harrowgate bridge stands on piers that predate the town. The drain under the market takes the water of four thousand people and has been cleared twice in the corporation’s books and never rebuilt.
This material is simply in use and no one thinks about it. It is not surveyed, is claimed by no one as antiquity, and appears in the records only when something goes wrong with it, which happens rarely and is then a considerable difficulty because no living mason understands how it was made. The corporation’s minute on the drain says as much in the plainest terms: it was cleared, it was not touched, and it was not to be touched.
The scale is the part visitors underestimate. The old roadbed under the northern road runs for forty miles beyond where any modern maintenance reaches and is still there, level, under turf, and is how the drove knows where to go. Two of the fen causeways stand on older causeways. Three wells in the upland were cut rather than dug, in rock, to a depth no local craft could reach, and they have never failed.
The march’s attitude to all this is entirely unromantic and is worth adopting. The old work is better than what the realm can make now and everybody knows it. No lesson is drawn. No glory is attached. A grazier whose well was cut a thousand years before the Crown existed will tell a visitor so in the tone he would use about the weather and will then ask what the visitor wants.
What follows from it practically is a rule the whole march obeys without having stated it: old work in use is left alone. The drain is not improved. The piers are not faced. The roadbed is not dug into even where a straighter line would save a mile. Asked why, the corporation says that it works, and every officer in the district will say the same, and none of them has ever been asked to justify the policy because none of them has noticed it is one.
The ruins proper are the part of the old world that has stopped being useful, and they are therefore the smaller part by a considerable margin. A traveller who arrives expecting a county of romantic broken towers should understand that most of the old world here is load-bearing, and that the interesting question in the march is not what fell down but what has gone on standing.
The Four Kinds
“Church ruin, house ruin, work ruin, and deep ruin. The first three anybody may tell you about. For the fourth you will want somebody who has been down one, and there are four such men in this county and two of them will not discuss it.”
The march sorts its ruins by what may be done with them and by who will object, which produces four kinds. A scholar’s classification by age or builder exists, is held at the priory, and is useless to anybody standing in front of one. The four are church ruins, house ruins, work ruins and deep ruins, and the practical difference between them is the whole of what a company needs.
A church ruin is a chapel, a shrine, a hermitage or a burial ground that has gone out of use. There are eleven in the march. They are consecrated ground and remain so: consecration does not lapse with the roof, which is the priory’s firm position and is also the assize’s. Entering one is lawful. Taking anything from one is sacrilege and the Church courts will hear it, which is the only class of ruin in the district with a live legal protection.
A house ruin is a dwelling, a farmstead, a mill or a hamlet that has been abandoned within memory or a little beyond. There are a great many and their number is the measurement of chapter twenty-two. They belong to somebody: an heir, a lord, a parish, or the Crown by escheat, and the ownership is usually traceable at the priory. Taking from one is theft, is prosecutable, and is done constantly.
A work ruin is something that was built for a purpose and is not a dwelling: a bridge, a mill race, a dam, a blockhouse of an earlier war, a lime kiln, a mine adit. The march has perhaps thirty. Ownership is frequently unclear and often nobody will object to a company taking stone or iron from one, which is why work ruins are the ordinary quarry of the district and why very few of them retain anything worth having.
A deep ruin is the fourth kind and the classification exists because of it. It is old work, below ground or mostly so, of a construction nobody now performs, whose purpose is not evident from inspection. There are five in the march that anybody will name and at least two more that are spoken of. They are not owned in any way a court has tested.
The fifth category is not a ruin and the march is firm about the distinction. A barrow is a grave. It was not a building, it has not fallen down, and it is not salvage in any sense. Anybody who treats a barrow as a ruin will be corrected by the first shepherd he meets, and the correction will be sharp, because in the upland the two words describe entirely different relations to the ground.
The Church Ruins
“Roofless, yes. Ruined, if you like. Consecrated still, and it will be consecrated when the last stone is under the turf, because what was done there was done and cannot be undone by weather. I have buried two people in a chapel that has had no roof since my grandfather’s day.”
The eleven church ruins of the march are the best documented and the least troublesome class and a company should understand their standing exactly. Consecration is permanent. It is not lost by disuse, by the fall of a roof, or by the passage of any interval, and can be removed only by a formal act of deconsecration which requires the bishop and which has been performed twice in the march within the record.
The consequence is that eleven roofless buildings in this district are legally and doctrinally churches. Burial in them is lawful and is still done at three. Divine service in them is lawful and is held at two, annually, on the patronal day, by an incumbent who walks out for the purpose. And anything within their bounds is protected, which includes the stone, the timber and the contents of any grave.
The two that were deconsecrated are instructive and both are in the visitation books. In each case the parish petitioned, the reason given was that the place could no longer be kept, and the bishop’s officer came north and performed the office. In each case the ground was afterwards walled rather than released, which was nobody’s requirement and which both parishes did at their own expense within a year.
What the march does with a deconsecrated chapel is therefore the same thing it does with the third burial island: it keeps ground it has formally given up. The walls are maintained. The bounds are walked at the parish bounding. Neither parish can say why. Both were asked by the visiting brother, and the answers recorded are that the ground was a church, that it is not now, and that it wants keeping up.
The nine that remain consecrated are not all quiet. Three carry accounts of the ordinary kind, two are avoided after dark by their own parishes, and one is on the list of five grounds in the march that nobody enters at all, which puts a consecrated chapel in the same category as the bad barrow. The priory is aware, has no explanation, and has continued to hold the annual service at two of the three that carry accounts.
For a company the rule is simple and the penalty is real. Enter freely. Shelter in one if the weather requires it, which is expressly permitted and which the priory encourages. Take nothing whatever, including fallen stone, including timber that is plainly rotten, including anything from a grave. The Church courts hear sacrilege, they hear it faster than the assize hears anything, and the march will give evidence.
The Deep Ruins
“Dressed stone, fitted without mortar, cut to a fineness I could not match with a year and a good mason. It goes down. That is all I will put in writing, and I have been asked by the Collegium to put more and have declined twice.”
Five deep ruins are named in the march and two more are spoken of without being located. They have four things in common and nothing else. They are of dressed stone fitted without mortar. They extend below ground, in every case further than anybody has followed. Their purpose is not evident from anything visible. And in every case the surface remains are small, which is why three of the five were not recognised as anything for generations.
The stonework is the part every account agrees on and the part that most impresses the people who have seen it. Blocks fitted to a closeness that will not take a knife blade, faces worked flat over spans of feet, and angles that are true. Two masons from Harrowgate have examined the exposed work at the Chapel Belt ruin and both said the same thing: that they could not do it, that they do not know anybody who could, and that they do not know how it was done.
The extent is unknown in all five cases. The furthest anybody in the record has gone into one is a matter of a few hundred feet, at two of the five, by parties that came out and reported passages continuing. Nobody has mapped one. The Collegium’s surveyor descended twice and his report, which the priory holds, describes what he saw and declines to estimate what he did not.
What they were for is the largest open question in the march. The four answers a company will hear are these. That they were works of the old world before the ruin years, which is the antiquaries’ position and explains the craft and nothing else. That they were made against something, which is the priory’s reading and rests on the belt that surrounds one of them. That they were made by something, which is the position of the fringe settlements. And that they are older than any of that, which two of the four masons who have seen the work prefer.
The evidence separates none of the four and the surviving accounts are honest about that. The stonework proves craft and does not identify a builder. The belt proves that somebody at some point wanted a distance kept, which fits the second and third answers equally. The absence of any inscription, ornament, or image anywhere in five structures is remarked on by everybody and is read as evidence by all four parties.
What is agreed is the local practice, which is uniform and unexplained. All five have ground kept around them: a no-cut belt in the wood, a piece of unstocked fell, an unfished reach, a walled enclosure, and in the fifth case a village that has simply never built within a quarter mile. None of the five arrangements was decreed by anybody. All five are maintained at cost. And the people maintaining them cannot say what the arrangement is for.
Who Claims Them
“The Crown claims all treasure. The priory claims consecrated ground. The lord claims his own land. And the deep ruins are claimed by nobody at all, which the county regards as an oversight and which has lasted four hundred years.”
Ownership of ruins in the march follows ordinary law and the ordinary law produces an extraordinary gap. Land is owned: by the Crown, by lords, by the priory, by parishes. Whatever stands on owned land belongs with the land. Treasure, meaning precious metal deliberately concealed, belongs to the Crown wherever found, which is the one rule every treasure man in the district knows and the one he most often ignores.
Church ruins are the priory’s in every practical sense and no one contests it. House ruins belong with the land and their owners are traceable, which means that taking from one is theft and that a company can also, with some patience, buy the right to strip one. Three parties have done this within the record, all three for the stone, and it is a legitimate trade that a company with a cart could make money at.
Work ruins are where the law becomes vague and the practice generous. A mill race on nobody’s land, a kiln on the waste, a bridge on a road that has gone: these are taken from continuously by everybody, nobody objects, and the assize has never heard a case about one. A company may take iron and stone from a work ruin without much risk, and should ask at the nearest settlement first purely as a courtesy.
The deep ruins are claimed by nobody and the gap is precise. They sit, in four cases out of five, on ground that is itself unclaimed in the sense chapter six described: between parishes, outside the walking, in the space. The fifth sits within a manor whose lord has been asked twice and on both occasions declined to assert a claim, in writing, which his attorney regarded as eccentric and which he has never explained.
The Collegium has the only formal interest and it is regulatory rather than proprietary. Its position is that such structures may contain matter requiring licence, that entering them is therefore a licensable activity, and that it will grant licences on application. Three have been granted in the century, all to its own surveyors. It has never prosecuted anybody for entering one without licence, which the attorneys read as an unwillingness to test the point.
What this means for a company is that the deep ruins are the one class of thing in the march that can be entered with no permission from anybody, no trespass, no sacrilege and no theft, and that this is a matter of an accident in the law rather than of anybody’s intention. Every attorney in Harrowgate will confirm it. Every one of them will also decline to say that it is a good idea.
Reading a Ruin Before Entering It
“Look at the ground round it before you look at it. Is anything grazed there, cut there, built there, walked there. A ruin nobody has bothered to keep away from is a ruin. A ruin with a mile of good pasture standing round it unstocked is something the district has decided about.”
The march reads a ruin by reading the ground around it and a company should learn the method before it needs it. The structure itself says very little: stone is stone, and a roofless building looks much the same whether it was left in a hurry or given up over fifty years. What the surrounding ground says is precise, is available at a distance, and costs nothing to read.
The first question is whether the ground is used. A ruin with sheep on it, a cart track to it, or a lambing fold built out of its stone is a ruin the district regards as ordinary, and whatever happened there is finished. This describes the great majority of ruins in the march and is why a company should not treat every fallen farmstead as an occasion.
The second is whether anything has been taken. A house ruin in a working district will have been stripped of its timber, its good stone, its ironwork and its glass within a generation, by the neighbours, entirely openly. A ruin of any age that still has its roof timbers lying where they fell is telling a company something quite specific, which is that people who needed timber decided against.
The third is the ground at a distance and this is the sign that matters. Unstocked pasture. An uncut belt. A bend in a track. A cut that stops. Where a district has arranged itself around a ruin at a cost it could have avoided, that arrangement is the district’s considered judgement, arrived at over generations, and it is worth more than any account a company will be given in an inn.
The fourth is the ordinary sign the whole volume has been describing, which is what the animals do. Crows on the walls is a good sign and a company should take it as one. No birds on a standing structure in summer, or stock that will not shelter in the lee of it in bad weather, is the same finding the wold makes about its barrows and the wood about its northern quarter, and it is read the same way.
The four signs are read as wardens read them: ask at the nearest settlement and attend to how the answer is given. Free discussion implies no settled view. Directions followed by a changed subject imply one. A question about what the company wants with the ruin means the district would rather it did not act alone.
