Eglingham

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Eglingham is a village in Northumberland, England, situated some seven miles to the north-west of Alnwick. It has about 100 dwellings, most situated either side of the through-road, and including the local manorial property, Eglingham Hall, dating to the 16th or 17th century. Village facilities include a village hall, a small primary school, and pub-restaurant, the highly-regarded Tankerville Arms. The 13th century parish church is dedicated to St. Maurice. The village is surrounded by mainly arable farmland, moorland and woodland, including an arboretum and some commercial forestry.

Eglingham is also a parish, of about nine miles in length, by four and a half in breadth, and comprises an area of 23,361 acres. It comprises 16 settlements - Bassington, Beanley, New and Old Bewick, Brandon, Branton, Crawley, Ditchburn, Eglingham, Harehope, Hedgley, East and West Lilburn, Shipley, Titlington - and several smaller places. The river Bremish, which rises in the Cheviots, runs through the parish. The geological composition of the parish includes rich gravelly loam along the path of the river; clay predominating in the centre of the parish, and unenclosed moorland in the south and east. Within the moor area is Kimmer Loch, covering 10 acres, and reputed to abound in perch and pike.

The parish is largely agricultural, although gravel extraction continues to the west. Villages in the parish also serve as bases for commuters working in Alnwick and Newcastle upon Tyne.

[edit] History

Eglingham is a rural village and parish of some antiquity. It was relatively densely populated, as evidenced by the many settlements in the parish, and supported extensive farming. Its population was also engaged in mining coal and quarrying limestone and freestone, all of which are described as being available in abundance^[1]. A nineteenth century travellers guide describes a steam of water which "is turned black as common ink by an infusion of galls"^[2]. Eglingham colliery closed in November 1897, after becoming unprofitable owing to the costs of removing water from the main coal seams at Black Hill.^[3].

According to the History, Topography, and Directory of Northumberland^[4], its population in 1801, was 1,536; in 1811, 1,538; in 1821, 1,666; in 1831, 1,805; in 1841, 1,832; and in 1851, 2,000 souls."

The parish offered a relatively prosperous living in the form of a vicarage in the diocese of Durham, valued in 1868 at £835. The church of St. Maurice is a stone structure, rebuilt after the English Restoration, having been destroyed, together with neighbouring chapels, by the Scots during the Rebellion, and was enlarged by the addition of a transept in 1836^[5].

Some time between 1217 and 1226, Richard Marsh, the then Bishop of Durham, gave the tithes of Eglingham to the Abbey of St. Albans to help the monks make a better ale, "taking compassion on the weakness of the convent's drink", according to an eighteenth century historian^[6]