A1-The Great North Road
| Ogilby's 1675 map shows 'Tarworth', 'Ravenskell', and 'Scrubey'. A century later Armstrong gave the modern spellings, Torworth, Ranskill and Scrooby, offering an alternative in Ravenskill. Was the Raven clever or dead? Patterson's Roads was still giving us Tarworth in 1815 but Doomesday listed it as Turdeworde. The village website, torworth.com claims that the pub, the Huntsman, is a "traditional coaching inn". The building, however, looks more Arts & Crafts circa 1900 than 18th century, but who am I to know? |
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Scrooby Top House, about a mile south of Scrooby village, was built in 1780 by Thomas Fisher, formerly of the Swan in Bawtry. He moved to Scrooby in an effort to better compete with the Bell at Barnby Moor. But the business only prospered for a while and closed as a posting house in 1821. Faded lettering advertising Bed and Breakfast Luncheons Teas shows another life before its eventual demise.
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| There's a milestone, its lettering completely faded, just to the right of Scrooby Top House. And a mile further north, just as one enters Scrooby village, the next stone has been commandeered as a support for a house name. |
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The road through Scrooby is now the A638 but the OS 1:50000 Landranger Series from 1982 labels it Great North Road and, just for good measure has the same wording printed again between Barnby Moor and Ranskill. The newer editions have dropped the northerly repetition of the wording.
The 'Northfield House' milestone marks the parting of the old Great North Road through the village, now a turning on the left signposted 'Low Road' and the main road which was constructed as a turnpike by-passing the village centre in 1776. The turnpike avoided a difficult spot. The waters of the river Ryton used to flow through the mill in the village and although there was a footbridge on the upstream side of the mill, other traffic passed through a ford across the pool on the downstream side. This is now bridged but it is a narrow windy lane which must have been unsuitable for traffic even in the 18th century. The 1776 turnpike takes a straighter line west of the village but still needed to cross the Ryton and its floodplain. It is raised on a causeway with two sets of arches to allow the escape of flood waters. The original bridge over the river itself has been replaced but the old brick arches to the south are still there. Their design, though on a smaller scale, is similar to those under Smeaton's road at Newark. They were constructed in 1770, just a few years earlier but whether Smeaton himself had a hand in this construction, I know not.
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Part of the causeway of the 1776 turnpike as it crosses the Ryton floodplain.
The tower in the background is at Harworth Colliery |
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Before 1776 the Great North Road ran through a ford in the tail race, which was only bridged in 1937, shortly before the mill, with its two undershot wheels, was closed. |
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There's a couple of acres of wild ground between the old road and the turnpike near the Ryton Bridge, a short walk to the north of Scrooby. In spring it has a dense carpet of lesser celendine (Ranunculus ficaria). Time to stop for a poem. |
To the Small Celandine Pansies, lillies, kingcups, daisies, William Wordsworth
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White's Directory of Nottinghamshire 1853: "The former glory of Scrooby was its Palace, which was long one of the principal seats of the successive Archbishops of York, but of the ancient abode of splendour and hospitality nothing now remains except some small fragments incorporated into a farm house. Leland describes it as: 'a great manor place standing withyn a mote, and builded yn courtes, whereof the first is very ample, and all builded of tymbre, saving the front of the haule, that is of bricke, to the wych ascenditur per gradus lupidia. The ynner courte building, as far as I marked, was of tymbre building, and was not in compare past the 4 parts of the utter courte'."
This farmhouse, or Scrooby Manor, as it is called was the birthplace of one William Brewster, (1567-1644), English separatist and Plymouth colonist. After studying briefly at Cambridge he became the chief member of the congregation at Scrooby that broke away, or separated, from the Anglican Church in 1606; the members, after their migration to Holland in 1608, were known as Pilgrims. On his press at Leiden, Brewster printed a number of religious books and tracts that were distributed throughout England. Returning to England in 1617, he helped make arrangements for the Pilgrim migration to America and in 1620 embarked on the Mayflower with his wife, two sons, and two indentured boys. Brewster, an elder of the church from the time he lived in Leiden, was the sole religious leader of the Plymouth Colony until 1629, but because he was not ordained, he confined his ministry to services of prayer and praise only. Although he held no lay offices, he was very influential, being one of the eight who undertook, in 1627, to discharge the debt to the colony's backers.
Perhaps more relevant to our study of the Great North Road, it was William Brewster's father, also called William Brewster, who was Master of the Queen's Posts in the 1580's, as well as being Receiver and Bailiff of the Archbishop's Estate at Scrooby, a job which got him the house. As White noted in 1853, there is not much left of the original palace and a tourist information board at the top of the lane asks visitors politely to respect the resident's privacy and view the house from a distance from a 'viewpoint' in Station Lane. Actually you don't get much of a view from there as the scenery is dominated by a lot of modern farm buildings. But carry on to the level crossing and lament the passing of the station. Scrooby Station closed in 1931, even before Dr. Beeching's day.
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Would the Pilgrims have approved of the Pilgrim Fathers? |
But they left the early 17th century vicarage behind. |
Excavations at Scrooby Top, Nottinghamshire, 1997
A paper discussing the 'Brick Pattern' of iron-age field systems in this area: "Towards a Social Archaeology of Later Prehistoric and Romano-British Field Systems in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire" Adrian Chadwick, Research School of Archaeology and Archaeological Science, University of Sheffield.
North of Scrooby there used to be a toll house in which the toll keeper and his mother were murdered in 1779. The perpetrator was hanged at what is now called Gibbet Hill. His body was left dangling for many years but there is now a garden centre and an owl sanctuary at the site. Times move on.
©Biff Vernon 2002, 2008
