Last updated 13:32, Thursday, 31 July 2008

AT HIGH Shaw farmhouse they can tell local tales ‘til the cows come home, and until quite recently those roving kine returned nightly because High Shaw was a byre in a past life.

Place for inspiration: High Shaw farmhouse near Langley - novelist Catherine Cookson lived nearby and 18th century painter John Martin roamed the hills around..

The long, low, stone-built property sits in a quiet triangle between Langley, Catton and Whitfield, and the land around has inspired creative imaginations for generations.

Novelist Catherine Cookson – “Wor Kate” – lived in Langley in the 1980s and set one of her bodice-rippers in the village.

John Martin the painter was born not far away in 1789, and he reproduced Langley’s hanging woods and cliffs in his first artworks.

The ill-fated Earls of Derwentwater – brothers who died as Jacobite traitors 30 years apart – owned Langley Castle and added to the stock of local legends.

And right by High Shaw’s back gate, prehistoric man left his stories in stone carvings which we can no longer read.

The house now known as High Shaw had been abandoned for some years when it had its upgrade for the new millennium and was transformed into a 21st century home – albeit with plenty of beams and flagstones to hark back to the past.

It’s not certain how far back that ‘past’ stretches. The present owner still has some ancient deeds, and it’s thought High Shaw’s foundations date to the late 17th century – the time of King Charles II.

Cattle were the only certain residents of the property in the 20th century, but it’s likely that generations of humans also called High Shaw home for much of its earlier existence.

There is a place marked High Shaw on Armstrong’s 1769 map of Northumberland, just below the farmhouse of High Staward, so it’s likely that High Shaw was a farm then too, though not quite up to the High Staward mark.

High Staward was a state-of-the-art, ‘model’ farm by the early 1800s. As well as the farmhouse it had a gin gan – a pioneering circular structure containing farm machinery which used wheels, gears and a donkey walking in a circle to power various pieces of labour-saving equipment like threshers and balers.

High Staward also boasted that quaint invention, a ‘podiggery’ – a pigsty with a poultry loft and dovecote combined. What a setting for a children’s book . . . Tales from the Podiggery?

Catherine Cookson probably never saw the local podiggery when she lived at Bristol Lodge, Langley. Otherwise she must have mentioned it in her Langley-based novel A Dinner of Herbs, written in 1985.

The story hinges on the fatal plummet of little Roddy Greenbank’s dad down the tree-hung cliffs near Langley Castle, leaving orphaned Roddy to be raised by the village wise woman, Kate Makepeace.

Those cliffs, just a few miles from High Shaw, gave food-for-thought to the artist and engraver John Martin, too.

Martin was born in East Land Ends Cottage in Haydon Bridge in 1789 and was schooled at the free Haydon Bridge Grammar School, which had been founded in 1685 by the still-revered Rev. John Shaftoe.

The wild rural landscape of the Langley area, slashed here and there by belching industrial chimneys, gave young Martin plenty of material for the fashionable painting style of the time – ‘the sublime’ – where he aimed to suggest brooding atmospheres set in huge, scary scenery.

Legend says it was to his estates at remote Langley that Jamie Radcliffe, Earl of Dertwentwater, fled when a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1715. He is supposed to have hidden with the Jacobite-inclined Bacon family at Staward Manor, just to the north of High Shaw, before setting out on the desperate mission which ended for him on Tower Hill.

In 1882, when a desolate and neglected Langley Castle was purchased by former Northumberland county sheriff, Cadwallader John Bates, he had a stone cross made which still stands by the roadside. This commemorates James and his brother Charles, Vicounts of Langley, who were beheaded on February 1716 and December 1746 respectively, “for loyalty to their lawful sovereign”.

If High Shaw’s neighbour Staward Manor has its romantic legends, so does Staward Pele just a little to the west.

Staward Pele was built for King Edward II – he of the gay lovers who is supposed to have been murdered most foully at Berkeley Castle in 1327. The tower was sited on the dramatic site of a Roman temple, on a high ridge above Staward Gorge only accessible along a narrow causeway guarded by a ditch and gatehouse.

Unsurprisingly, this gift of a stronghold was snapped up in the 18th century by Langley’s most notorious reiver, Dickey of Kingswood.

The tale associated with Dickey brings us back to cattle again.

One day he helped himself to a couple of fat oxen from a farm at Denton Burn and managed to drive them to Lanercost near Brampton without rousing the ‘Hot Trod’ in pursuit.

Dickey’s luck continued. He sold the oxen to a Lanercost farmer who even gave a night’s free B&B to the double-dealing reiver. Next morning, not only had Dickey and the bacon and eggs disappeared, but also the farmer’s most prized mare.

Trotting home to Staward, Dicky met the Denton Burn farmer seeking his oxen.

“I saw your cattle at Lanercost,” said tricky Dickey. “Why don’t you buy my horse and ride there at once?”

So the loser of the cattle set off on a wild goose chase, to confront the supposed thief while riding his own stolen mare. And Dickey loped off laughing to Staward Pele, his pockets full of gold.

A possible reiver descendant lived to the south west of High Shaw. William Charlton is recorded as resident of Hindley Wrea farm in 1882. He’s a long way from the Charlton stronghold of Hesleyside Hall near Bellingham, but those Charltons did get about – some as far as Ashington!

But not all High Shaw’s neighbours had dramatic histories. At Gingle Pot farm just to the north lived Robert and Jane Robson and their baby Edward in 1817. Robert was a simple woodman.

Gingle Pot made it into the diaries of historian William Weaver Tomlinson, who stopped there on a ramble in 1888 to boil a kettle for tea. The ruins of the fireplace, flue and boiler where Tomlinson’s kettle simmered can still be seen among the weeds and shrubs.

As for prehistoric man, his enigmatic ‘tags’ can be seen all over a sandstone gatepost at High Shaw – a complicated pattern of hollows and grooves which no doubt told a great tale a few thousand years ago, but sadly is all Celtic to us today.

l High Shaw, High Staward, Langley-on-Tyne, is for sale through George F. White.