When a Queen came calling at Beltingham
Last updated 15:45, Thursday, 23 October 2008
BELTINGHAM House is a Georgian doll’s house made large, a perfect little mansion where you can imagine Alice in Wonderland having tea with the Queen of Hearts.
Actually that’s not far from the truth. Royalty has been known to stop for a snack at Beltingham.
For several generations the house – part of the Ridley estate – has been owned by the Bowes-Lyon family. Queen Elizabeth the late Queen Mother, born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, naturally popped in to see her relatives when she travelled in the North.
She is not thought to have slept at Beltingham House – usually choosing to stay at Ridley Hall – so there is no Queen’s bedroom at Beltingham. But the house, now up for sale, is entitled to a Queen’s dining room because she definitely had a few lunches there.
In the war years the then Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by her husband King George VI, paid a hush-hush visit to Tynedale. The Queen’s uncle, Francis Bowes-Lyon, had told her of the beauty and peace of his estate, and in 1943 Queen Elizabeth would have been grateful for a brief respite from gloomy, blitzed London.
The royal couple are said to have slept overnight on the official train, halted on the former Alston branch railway line near Featherstone. But it’s likely they would have paid a flying visit to the clan at Ridley.
When she was Queen Mother, the ex-Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon made visits to Tynedale in 1980 and again in 1988.
On the first visit she opened the Hunday Tractor Museum at Newton (now the fifiefofum gallery). And when she came back eight years later, she cut the ribbons at Mickley’s Cherryburn museum to engraver Thomas Bewick, and at the new ‘walkers’ bothy’ at Once Brewed.
The nation’s favourite granny called in for lunch at Beltingham House after these official duties, as its present owner still recalls. The Queen Mum would have enjoyed a cosy chat with her cousins.
Some records say Beltingham House was designed to be a home farm when it was built around 1750, just a mile from the main estate seat at Ridley Hall. But it is rather elegant for a farmhouse, and a more likely role is that of ‘dower house’ – a refuge for the family’s unmarried and widowed ladies – which is what it has been for much of its existence.
Two maiden ladies, Muriel and Freda Bowes-Lyon – daughters of Francis – made their home at Beltingham House for many years. And until she died last year, so did Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, widow of Francis’s son, Geoffrey.
The Bowes-Lyon roots are Scottish but their village of Beltingham was once a stronghold of a Viking called Boltr.
The estate including Beltingham was acquired by the Ridleys in the 1500s, but in the next century’s Civil War the Royalist Ridleys lost their land.
Beltingham passed to the Lowes family, the Bates family and the Davidson family before landing in the lap of the Bowes-Lyons in 1887.
The family found the dower house quite useful in the Second World War when the Army commandeered Ridley Hall, forcing the Bowes-Lyons to decamp temporarily to Beltingham House. And when Francis Bowes-Lyon died in 1948 at the ripe age of 91, his womenfolk made the move from Ridley Hall to Beltingham a permanent one.
There is another theory about the origins of Beltingham House. Could it have been built not for ladies but for clergy? It is in a perfect spot to be the rectory of St Cuthbert’s, Beltingham, just over the garden wall.
Francis Bowes-Lyon was always a generous benefactor of St Cuthbert’s, and he – and seven other members of his family – chose to be buried there. He enlarged the churchyard, added a lychgate, and paid for two stained glass windows.
Interestingly, the windows were given as thanks for divine mercy when Francis’s daughter Muriel and another relative, Lady Mabel Lindsey, Dowager Countess of Strathmore, survived one of England’s earliest severe-injury car crashes. The ladies came to grief at Brackies Burn near Bardon Mill in 1904. It was only eight years earlier that the first fatal car accident was recorded in London.
Francis Bowes-Lyon’s advent in 1887 was a renaissance for Saint Cuthbert's, Beltingham. This once red-star religious centre had been down on its luck for many centuries, and Francis restored some of its ancient dignity.
The church’s claim to glory dates back 1,100 years, when the monks of Lindisfarne, fleeing the wrath of the Norsemen with the body of their leader St Cuthbert, took a break at Beltingham. The one night stopover of the late saint gave the honour of his name to the village chapel.
The earliest church was rather shack-like but soon the village could afford stone – adding a little grated ‘squint’ in the north wall so the residents of the local leprosy hospital could watch the clergy without spreading the lurgy.
Plague and pestilence were not the only challenges faced by vicars of Beltingham. The priest of 1311 was carried off by marauding Scots, and the parish was ordered to raise a ransom or never see him again. Beltingham forgot to pay up, which was a mistake because the Scots came back the next year and settled the bill by slaughtering everyone.
Money problems raised their ugly heads frequently for St Cuthbert’s during the next few hundred years. In 1650 the chapel was described as “almost quite ruinate”. By 1723 it was little better, with “a hole in the west end where birds could fly in”.
Just over a century later Beltingham’s curate, the Rev Francis Benson, appealed for cash aid before Christmas 1831, and twice in 1832. In 1836 he went cap-in-hand again, this time for help towards church repairs.
The building remained in a sorry state – “damp and wretchedness reigned” as the Hexham Courant put it – until 1884, when money was found for a massive overhaul.
The sum of £1,400 (£706,317 in comparative terms today) paid for a new slate roof and proper oak pews to replace rotten old deal benches, among other revamps. And from 1887 Beltingham’s church was safely in the hands of the Hon. Francis Bowes-Lyon, whose niece Elizabeth went on to have such a glittering career.
l Beltingham House, Beltingham, near Bardon Mill, is for sale via national agents Knight Frank, and Land Factor of Stocksfield.
