Published at 09:37, Friday, 20 November 2009

BOWES Cottage has only been a house since the 1970s.

Fit for a queen? Bowes Cottage, in Bardon Mill, which has strong links with the Queen Mother’s family.

Before that, the little one-storey dwelling in the village of Bardon Mill served the community as a café. And before it provided buns and tea, it apparently supplied nails and horseshoes, because those with long memories recall it was a forge.

Possibly at the same time as the smith plied his trade there, Bowes Cottage was a useful neighbour to the nearby Bowes Hotel, because it is said to have provided the hostelry with extra stabling for guests.

The small stone cottage, now up for sale, has a prime position at the heart of the village. It is right opposite what must have been one of the longest-established village post offices in England until it closed earlier this year.

The Bardon Mill Post Office can trace its history back more than 160 years. For those who know and love Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford this means Bardon Mill had its post office at about the same time as Candleford’s stamps and postal orders were ruled by Miss Dorcas Lane’s revered father.

A century ago, in 1910, records show the Bardon Mill postmaster was James Henry Thompson. He supervised nine deliveries per weekday to and from Carlisle, Hexham, and Newcastle, and four deliveries on Sundays – those were the days!

In the same year, John Lawrence Dickinson ran the Bowes Hotel which was at least 100 years old then. Victorian maps confusingly call it Station Hotel or Hall Inn, but it was certainly the Bowes Hotel when it delighted some hungry Edwardian tourists and they gave it a good plug in a 1908 book: By the Roman Wall: Notes on a Summer Holiday.

After a tour of Roman Corbridge, Maria Hoyer and her chums tried to get lunch at the Wheatsheaf, but it was locked. They tried The Angel where they could see tables tantalisingly set for lunch, but “a crueller blow”, every table was booked.

As a last resort they got on the train to Bardon Mill, where “we found a very decent little inn, the Bowes Hotel, and after a good, solid tea we started off for a walk”.

The Hoyer party stayed at the “friendly little Bowes Hotel” while they explored the nearby Roman settlement of Vindolanda. But their last meal at the Bowes was sadly rushed. They “ partook of a somewhat hasty lunch and hurried to the train, for if you lose a train in these regions it is a serious matter!”.

Bardon Mill has had its railway line since 1836 and – not far from Bowes Cottage – the village’s mock-Tudor station and Station Road cottages for railway staff date from 1838.

Easy access to public transport was a treasure for the whole community, but the railway line at Bardon Mill also brought a real crock of gold to one local man.

In 1836, navvy Thomas Pattison was cutting stone sleepers at Barcombe Quarry for the nearby railway line. A stroke of his pick uncovered a small metal purse containing 63 coins – three gold and the rest bronze – from the time of Emperor Claudius.

The loss for an unknown Roman soldier was a fabulous gain for a poor navvy like Thomas and he couldn’t stop talking about it.

Soon word of Pattison’s Hoard came to the ears of the Duke of Northumberland. He decided to exert his land owner’s rights, and the matter went to a hearing at the Anchor Inn at Haydon Bridge.

Pattison chickened out of the ordeal, leaving the Duke to win Treasure Trove.

The legal setback persuaded Pattison to fight for his find, worth £18 – that’s £14,633 in average earnings today. He asked his brother William from Blenkinsopp to hide the purse while he scarpered to Wales.

But Pattison ended up in debtors’ prison and though he recovered his Roman coins, he died soon after, a broken man.

If you lived in Victorian Bardon Mill and you didn’t work on the railway, another major employer was the mill which gave the village its name.

Bardon Mill had a corn miller in 1857 called James Ridley, but there is also a record that year of a “flannel manufactory” or wool mill, run by William Madgen and Son.

By 1878, the mill at Bardon Mill had another lease of life. The site had been taken over by potters Robert Errington and William Reay for their booming domestic sanitary-ware factory.

Right next to Bowes Cottage, Errington Reay and Co. made bowls for various intimate uses, drainage pipes and ornamental pottery, and were successful inventors.

The “Bardon Mill Smoke Curer” was a revolutionary chimney pot designed 80 years ago to cure the problem of smoke blowing back into rooms. The Errington Reay company still has pre-war letters from grateful householders, who had been on the verge of quitting their smoky hearths for ever before trying the life-changing Bardon Mill chimney pot.

And the Errington-Reay invention is still collecting accolades – another just nine years ago from the National Association of Chimney Sweeps.

Just a word to explain why Bowes Cottage – and the Bowes Hotel – came to be so named.

The Bowes family is one of the most illustrious local land owners, who have even supplied this country with a queen. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married George V’s second son, Bertie, who became George VI in 1936. Queen Elizabeth – aka the Queen Mother – lived to be 101 and visited this region many times, calling on her relatives at Beltingham and Ridley Hall, both just a few miles from Bardon Mill.

l Bowes Cottage at Bardon Mill is for sale via Foster Maddison of Hexham.

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