Published at 09:48, Friday, 03 April 2009

IN THE year 1752 – disturbingly close to the Scottish bid for power that was the second Jacobite Rebellion – a sniper gunned down a government official known as The Red Fox, in lonely woods near Appin in Argyll.

Romantic link: Wardrew Lodge, near Gilsland.

The local Stuarts were rounded up; the likely culprit escaped but one of his relatives was hanged despite his loud protests of innocence, just to remind the Stewarts that George of Hanover was boss in Great Britain.

The colourful Appin murder was splashed across pamphlets and newspapers throughout the kingdom, and was later written into a classic novel.

Meanwhile, near Gilsland on the western edge of Northumberland, 20 miles inside the Border, assassination and revolt made little impact on the masons who were quietly assembling stones and mortar into Wardrew House. And presumably around that time Wardrew Cottage was built, later to become Wardrew Lodge which is now for sale.

The classic novel which featured the Appin murder was that stirring saga of the glens, Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson. But the area around Wardrew and Gilsland can boast its own connection to an equally celebrated Edinburgh-born writer – Sir Walter Scott.

Scott visited Gilsland and stayed at Wardrew as a 26-year-old tourist in 1797, and the place was to have a huge impact on him.

Not only did its romantic, craggy setting spark off some of his most swashbuckling tales, it urged him to take his own plunge into romance. It was at Gilsland – after a whirlwind affair – that Scott proposed marriage to Margaret Charlotte Charpentier.

Margaret was the perfect amour for an idealistic and imaginative young man at that time – a royalist emigré who had escaped the tumbrils of the French Revolution to seek safety in England. The holiday-making Scott ended up ‘popping the question’ to Mlle Charpentier at Gilsland’s so-called Popping Stone.

The Popping Stone still exists – not one but three large rounded boulders on the edge of the River Irthing, almost due west of Wardrew Lodge. But just who created the Popping Stone legend is open to question.

Old histories of the area, such as Jollie’s 1804 Guide to Gilsland, don’t mention any Popping Stones. Nor do early biographies of Sir Walter Scott. It looks likely that the ‘ancient tradition’ dates back only to the Gilslanders’ realisation that they really ought to cash in on their Scott connection when the writer became a big name from the early 1800s.

But there are others who think that the Popping Stone deserves its claim to antiquity, being a trysting place for centuries in a folk memory from immeasurably distant days, when it was a sacred stone for Stone Age fertility rituals. Trust Scott to tune into local pagan vibes!

He also must have lurked around the churchyard of Over Denton, a mile from Wardrew, where he spotted a curious gravestone which read: “Here lieth the Body of Margaret Teasdale of Mumps Hall who died May the 5th 1777 aged 98 years. What I was once some may relate. What I am now is each one’s fate.”

Scott wrote Margaret into his 1815 novel Guy Mannering. She became landlady Tib Mumps – not Scott’s witch, Meg Merrilies, as some have assumed.

Margaret Teasdale ruled the loneliest inn in the area – last before the Scottish Border – at a time when dark midnight deeds were ten a’ penny. She was a canny woman of amazonian proportions who could deal with a brawl or a trickster. The real Meg needed no witchcraft.

Gilsland needed no witchcraft either. It had its magic waters; the sulphur and chalybeate-rich springs which became Gilsland Spa were known for generations for their health-giving properties. Old maps show one well marked not far from Wardrew Lodge.

In Scott’s day the Gilsland Spa Hotel was called The Shawes, and it was one of three hotels in Gilsland catering for those with “cutaneous disorders” who came to cure their sufferings by pinching their noses and glugging down doses of bad-egg-smelling water. The other two boarding houses were Orchard House and Wardrew, though whether that means the house or the cottage is not clear.

Wardrew won a personal mention in the writings of a traveller 60 years before Sir Walter Scott’s time.

John Buncle wrote in 1740: “In Northumberland there is a place called Wardrew, to the north-west of Thirlwall Castle which stands on that part of the Picts' Wall.

“Here, as I wandered about this wild, un-travelled country in search of Roman antiquities, I arrived at a sulphur spring, which I found to be the strongest and most excellent of the kind in all the world.

“Its dangerous situation and its remoteness will prevent its being ever much visited, admirable as the spa is. The country people thereabouts drink plentifully of the water, to their sure relief in many dangerous distempers. It is to them a blessed spring.”

When Buncle visited, Wardrew was most likely the property the Carrick family. They had been around Gilsland a long time. When Good Queen Bess was on the throne, Andrew Carrocke and Jenkin Carrocke were tenement holders in Gilsland – paying a yearly rent of three shillings and sixpence each – and “Richard Thirlwall held land called Wardrew”.

A century or so later, the tenants were the bosses. In the 1700s John Carrick “acquired the Wardrew and other neighbouring estates in addition to his patrimony at the Shawes; and erected new and more commodious houses at both” – probably including Wardrew House and cottage. A “John Carrick of Wardrew in the parish of Haltwhistle” is recorded in 1748.

Wardrew crops up again in Mackenzie’s 1825 study of the county of Northumberland, being dubbed “a celebrated spa, a short distance north of the Wall on the east bank of the River Irthing”. Gilsland Spa is on the west bank.

By 1901 Wardrew Lodge was the shooting box of Sir Charles Stamp Milburn, Baronet. Sir Charles, with the odd ‘postal’ middle name, was the second to hold the new title – given to the family for making a fortune in shipping and coal. His main family seat was near Shilbottle on the eastern side of the county.

When Sir Charles ventured west to Wardrew in 1901 for a few day’s hunting, he could enjoy a resort with all mod. cons of the new 20th century, yet with wild terrain right on his doorstep.

The post from Carlisle and Newcastle arrived at Gilsland three times a day; there was a handy Gilsland railway station run by William Bell; Sir Charles could be re-shod by Gilsland boot-maker Edward Charlton, and tuck into sweeties made by local confectioner Jennie Borrow.

And, of course, he could rely on a prime detox via the local springs. Wardrew and Gilsland may seem like the back-of-beyond, but its water put it on the national map.

l The sale of Wardrew Lodge, Gilsland, is being handled by Red Hot Property of Old Church, off Hexham Market Place.

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