Skipton Road Field Walls & Brackenley House

If you walk around Embsay you will see both gritstone and limestone dry-stone walls built with random sized boulders, as you would expect in a North Yorkshire village. But why did someone go to the expense of cutting thousands of rectangular stone blocks just to build a field wall along the Skipton Road? Was this an important road or was this someone trying to make a statement? Is there any link with the mason-built stone wall on the opposite side of the road?

The Tithe Map of 1847 details who owned what lands in Embsay and Eastby. In the Mill Holme area of the village, there was a cotton spinning mill south of the Skipton Road, close to the Cavendish pub. This was a water powered mill with the mill-pond on the opposite side of the road, (the Blue area numbered 273 on the map). This is now the gardens of the Cavendish View cottages and the reason why they flood after very heavy rain!

In 1847 the mill was owned by a Thomas Baynes Preston, together with all of the lands outlined on the map in red. He died a bachelor aged 35 and it is probable that the lands owned by Thomas Baynes Preston were sold to a Thomas Fletcher, a Civil Engineer and agent for a limestone quarry. He is recorded in 1861as living in ‘Bracklands’ House, a commonly used spelling for what we now call Brackenley House. Fletcher probably used his civil engineering skills and contracts to design and build the unique styled Brackenley House in the 1850s.

Fletcher died in 1865 and Brackenley House was sold or transferred to Miles Veevers, late of Habergham Eaves. He was married to Sarah Fletcher, the sister of Thomas Fletcher, and she was probably bequeathed the property and lands by her unmarried brother. Miles died in 1869, but Sarah and her seven children lived in Brackenley House until the 1890s. Either Sarah, Miles or their children developed property in Embsay. In 1886 an advertisement in the Yorkshire Post recorded ‘Mr Veevers’ should be contacted by those interested in becoming tenants in Millholme Weaving shed with its ’12 recently built Cottages’. These were most probably the 12 terraced cottages along Skipton Rd opposite the Cavendish and around the corner into West Lane. The 1889 Ordnance Survey map shows these twelve cottages, and comparison with the tithe map shows that they were built on land that had, 50 years previously, been owned by Baynes Preston, making it very likely that Thomas Fletcher and then Miles and Sarah Veevers owned all the same land. The Old Cotton Mill and the adjacent mill pond, showed before, are not shown on the 1889 OS map, the cotton mill having been demolished and the five cottages of Cavendish Row were shown built on the old mill pond. The census enumerator for 1901 recorded these as ‘Veevers Houses’, long after the Veevers had left Brackenley House.

The earliest available map showing Brackenley House is from 1889 and it shows the layout of the gardens and field next to the house. It can be seen today that the walls surrounding the house are finely cut, and this standard of stonework continues along Skipton Road until it reaches Brackenley Drive. The style of the stonework, with dressed edges and an exaggerated ‘natural’ finish was a style used in the Victorian period, a style seen elsewhere in the village. When 16 and 18 Skipton Road were built, the wall was removed to allow access to the new houses. The 1889 map also shows a row of trees alongside the road, growing close together in a manner not seen elsewhere in the village other than at Embsay Kirk. The field in which these trees have been planted (known as Curlew Mew in the 1847 tithe map) was owned by Baynes Preston and thus, most probably, by Miles, Sarah Veevers and their children.

It would appear that the residents of Brackenley House beautified the approach to their house with a high quality, mason-built wall with a row of trees set behind.

And what about the field wall with the rectangular cut stones, built alongside the Skipton Road? These stones form the walls in front of the houses on the railway embankment side of Skipton Road, almost to lower Bow Bridge. On the opposite side of the road, similar stones are used in the wall in front of 20-26 Skipton Road, up to where the public footpath meets the road. All the thousands of squared stones were most probably the proceeds of the demolition of the old cotton spinning mill. Thomas Fletcher, Miles or Sarah Veevers, the civil engineer or the property developers, chose to use these stones to upgrade the roadside field walls. The finished wall would have looked impressive when compared to the ‘rustic’ dry-stone walls along the road from Skipton to Bow Bridge, further improving the approach to the village and the grand entrance to Brackenley House

It is thought that the site of the demolished cotton mill was used to create tennis courts or a croquet green. If anyone has any early pictures that shows the Skipton Road close to the Brackenley Road junction, we would be very interested in looking at them.

Chris Lunnon – Embsay With Eastby Historical Research Group

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