Published at 06:12, Friday, 26 February 2010

IT IS quite possible that Kirkhaugh Farmhouse – at present looking for new owners – was built by, or for, the family of Maughan.

Family home: Kirkhaugh Farmhouse, near Slaggyford, built for the Maughan family.

In the 19th century you couldn’t turn round without meeting a Maughan in the manor of Kirkhaugh near Slaggyford.

Today, Kirkhaugh has just a church, two farmsteads and a resurrected railway line where tourists sample the Steam Age. But the village was slightly more crowded a Century ago, and the 1881 census lists no fewer than 13 Maughans living in Kirkhaugh.

Among them were Thomas and Ann Maughan, who lived at Kirkhaugh Farmhouse with four children, one stepson and Hannah Watson the maid-of-all-work.

John and Jane Maughan farmed next door at Temple House.

Maughans crop up in Kirkhaugh way back in the 18th century. In 1831, one John Maughan held the farm at least 20 years before the present house was completed. A later John Maughan of Kirkhaugh branched out into local politics, chairing both Haltwhistle Rural District Council and the local Board of Guardians in 1910.

A host of memorials to Maughans are displayed at Kirkhaugh’s Church of The Holy Paraclete – notably seven among 19 names on the tablet honouring local dead in the Great War of 1914-1918.

One late Victorian Maughan (possibly Thomas’s son Walton) put Kirkhaugh on the map by inventing the idea of the “Traffic Census for the Classification of Roads” and writing a book about the management of steamrollers.

And by the 1930s the Maughans had spread the fame of Kirkhaugh to the other side of the world. An Australian newspaper records the engagement of Marjorie Roper, of Nukarni in the sandy western wilds, to J. Stewart Maughan, youngest son of the late Mr John and Mrs Maughan, of Kirkhaugh.

Residents of Kirkhaugh Farmhouse who were not of the Anglican persuasion had a handy non-conformist chapel just yards from their home.

A tiny Wesleyan chapel was built for Kirkhaugh’s Methodists in 1873 – still recorded by a plaque on the wall. It cost £150 which would have been donated by local people, and was designed to hold at least 80 worshippers.

Later a little schoolroom was added. It was used as a church until about 30 years ago.

But given the quantity of Maughan memorabilia in the Church of the Holy Paraclete, it’s likely they were solidly CofE.

This church, also not far from Kirkhaugh Farm, must be one of the most remarkable buildings in the vicinity. Its name and style are both unique.

It seems to be the only church in the country to bear the name of Holy Paraclete. There is a convent of Holy Paraclete nuns at Whitby, but not another English parish church. Surprising, given the cosy meaning of the Greek word “paracletos” – “the one who stands alongside to help you” – which would seem an apt name for places of worship.

The church we see today was an 1868 replacement for a 13th century chapel, and was the brainchild of local rector – and frustrated architect – Octavius James.

Without expert help, the Rev. James designed Kirkhaugh’s church and topped it off with a very striking pin-thin steeple which divided the building-buff community.

One guide book describes the spire as “ridiculously thin” but for another it was “elegantly tapered”.

The Rev. James was sensitive to the history of this ancient holy place, and re-used a stained glass window, cannily rescued from the wreckage of the medieval church.

The designing rector also practised his talents on his own home, Clarghyll Hall, a couple of miles from the church and from Kirkhaugh Farm. There, he threw out wings, stacked up a tower and added a chapel. Again he was aware of his duty to history, preserving a 300-year-old bastle house in the Hall’s completed design.

Kirkhaugh Farmhouse has its own bastle, just a farm building now, but vital to family safety when it was built in 1692.

The Golden Age of the cattle-stealing, kidnapping Border Reiver was drawing to a close by then, but remote communities like Kirkhaugh still thought it sensible to design their houses with thick walls, massive door bars, and a trapdoor in the ceiling, so the family could hide upstairs and pull the ladder up behind them.

The people of Kirkhaugh had millennia to get used to being a thoroughfare for travellers both threatening and innocent. The village is near a crossing point for the River South Tyne which was a well-trodden cattle drovers’ path before the Romans came. It was a ford at first, then a footbridge was built and one still survives today, not far from Kirkhaugh Farm.

The Romans tramped all across the Kirkhaugh area, not just over its bridge.

They built a fort which later generations called Whitley Castle, they marched along the Maiden Way which runs just behind Kirkhaugh Farmhouse, and they left behind carved altars and statues of Hercules.

One of the UK’s richest graves of the Bronze Age Beaker People was found at Kirkhaugh, where flint tools and a strange trug-shaped gold earring, plus decorated beaker, accompanied one Kirkhaughian to the underworld.

And, fittingly for the home of all this antiquity, Kirkhaugh was the birthplace of the writer of the first published History of Northumberland – the Rev. John Wallis.

He was born in 1714 at Castle Nook Farm, next to the Roman fort and just a few hundred yards from the plot where Kirkhaugh Farmhouse was later built.

l Kirkhaugh Farmhouse is for sale through Pennine Ways of Alston and Haltwhistle.

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk