History of Clints, Marske

A quarter of a mile northwest of Marske is a small hamlet called Clints. “Clints” means limestone crags, gullies or cliffs (the modern Danish word for a cliff is “klint”). As you approach Clints along the track from Marske, the view opens out to reveal a rather odd assemblage of buildings that includes an old chapel and a substantial range set around a green, with an eighteenth-century coach house visible further along the track and other buildings higher up among the wooded crags.  The buildings and their setting are slightly eccentric – they might make you wonder how they came to be the way they are and whether they have a story to tell.

The earliest known image of Clints (reproduced below) is a sketch of Clints Hall by Samuel Buck made between 1719 and 1720¹.  The sketch shows a small, three-bay manor house that looks Elizabethan in style with its battlements and mullioned and transomed windows.  The house faces southeast, towards Marske, and there is a large area of walled garden in front, with a formal entrance gateway approached via semi-circular stone steps.  Nowadays there appears to be no trace of the façade of this manor house, so what became of it? 

Clints was owned by the Willances during the 16^th and early 17th seventeenth centuries. Robert Willance had been a prosperous Richmond draper, and invested in Swaledale lead mines. He is famed locally for a hunting accident on Whitcliffe Scar, near Richmond in 1606, where his horse bolted over the cliff (now known as Willance’s Leap). Willance survived and lost his leg in the incident; the horse didn’t fare so well. He was so thankful for his survival that he presented the townsmen of Richmond with the “Willance Cup”.

Willance later became Alderman (Mayor) of Richmond, and was buried at St Mary’s church, supposedly next to his amputated leg^2,3! The Willance cup can be seen in the Green Howards Museum in Richmond, and is pictured below.

Ownership of Clints Hall passed to Dr John Bathurst when he married Elizabeth Willance in 1636⁴.  John Bathurst (1607-1659) was a physician whose patients included Oliver Cromwell⁵.  He was MP for Richmond in 1656 and 1658 and he set up the Bathurst Charity at Richmond School⁶, and also founded a school at Helwith in 1659 to teach all children of tenant farmers in the manor of New Forest⁷.  A portrait of him hangs in the Royal College of Physicians today. 

Clints passed to John Bathurst’s great-grandson Charles (?1703-43), who developed lead mines in Swaledale⁵ (see also page on lead mining).  The CB Inn in Arkengarthdale is named after him⁸. 

In 1761 The Bathursts sold Clints to the Turners of Kirkleatham⁹.  The beautiful map below dated 1759 was produced at around the time of that sale¹⁰.

In common with other important families at that time, the Turners had made a fortune breeding race-horses, and they commissioned the architect John Carr of York to alter Clints Hall and add stables, a coach house for three coaches, an orangery and a walled garden.  Images of the building after the 1760s (see below) show that the house was transformed and greatly enlarged, so much so that it dominated the view of the valley. 

A family history website includes a very good history of Orgate Farm, previously part of the Clints Estate, and its occupants over time¹². The website also includes some early history of the Marske area more generally as well.

Towards demolition

In 1787 the Turners sold Clints to Viscount Downe who sold it on after only a year to Miles Stapleton.  The Errington family bought it in 1800 and lived in it until they put it up for sale in 1840, at which point the Huttons of Marske bought it and demolished almost the entire building (see the fascinating Clints Hall sales particulars).  One can only conjecture why they would have gone to the expense and trouble of demolishing it. Raine¹³, who spoke regularly with the Hutton family in the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that Clints Hall was demolished due to it being architecturally irregular, and because its setting created competition with Marske Hall. In 1880 Raine states that: “the wayfarer is no longer startled by seeing before him in that solitary valley two ancient manor-houses distant from each other but a few hundred yards”. Or perhaps the building had simply become so delapidated that it was cheaper to pull it down and re-sell the stone.  

But not everything was demolished and removed.  The Turners’ coach house, orangery, walled garden and parts of the stables remain.  The much older chapel building remains.  The range on the green has been remodelled (probably in the 1840s) as three cottages, and the right-hand cottage perhaps echoes the past with its castellations and “coaching corner”. Internally too there is plenty of evidence that the buildings are much older than it appears externally.  It is shown as a wing of the hall on a plan of Clints dated 1756⁹.  There is a line of very old yews along the boundary of the steep hillside and the gardens on the southeast side of Clints.  The extent of these yews may show where the front of Clints Hall stood – which is thought to be some 10-15 metres southeast of the front of the cottage that faces east today. And finally plants that may have originally been planted in an old medicinal garden sometimes turn up today in the ground near the old Hall today, including henbane, monk’s hood, opium poppy, and hemlock.

Catholicism at Clints

Religion adds another dimension to the story of Clints¹⁴.  It seems that many of the owners of Clints were Catholics. The Stapletons, who owned Clints from 1768 to 1800, are recorded as having their own priest at Clints and establishing a chapel inside the Hall, and there are records in the parish registers of burials of Catholics who worked at Clints during those years⁴.  Local folklore mentions a “priest hole” that led to a tunnel running from Clints Hall up onto the “mountain top a good distance away”¹⁴. By the early nineteenth century Clints may have sustained a Catholic population of around 60¹⁵, or roughly 20% of the population of the Marske area (see Population through time). The Catholic registers also record that in 1790 the priest at Clints Hall was Rowland Davies, who had been taught by Handel and may have played the organ at the coronation of George III¹⁴.  

“local folklore mentions a ‘priest hole’ …”

After the Relief Act of 1829 Catholics were free to worship in openly. The Errington family (Thomas and Catherine Errington) who had bought the Clints Estate and Hall in 1800 were catholic as well.  Their eldest son Michael was born in 1801 – he left Clints, married in Paris in 1838, and lived in Dublin thereafter¹⁶ – he died in 1874. [Michael’s son, also George and living in Dublin, was an MP and one-time British representative to the Vatican at a time when British relations there were tricky^17,18.] It was Michael who sold Clints Hall to the Timothy Hutton in 1842 prior to it being demolished. Michael, despite apparently moving to France in the late 1830s, and then to Ireland, retained links with Marske. His name is embossed, along with John Hutton’s, on a piece of lead sheeting that was incorporated into repairs to the church roof in 1868 – it is now attached to the inside west wall of Marske church.

His younger brother, George (1804-1886), who also appears to have left Clints by the 1830s who was Co-adjutor Archbishop of Westminster for some time in his later life (1855-60), and also curiously the titular Bishop of Trabzon on the Turkish Black Sea Coast^14,19. He became the first catholic Bishop of Plymouth and gave his occupation as “Archbishop” in the 1871 census¹⁶! Being Co-adjutor at Westminster should have led to him becoming Archbishop of Westminster on Archbishop Wiseman’s death in 1865. However he was sidestepped over his stance on papal infallability – his opponents (“neo-ultramontanes”²⁰) believed that just about anything uttered by the Pope was infallable, whereas Errington took a more limited view^14,21. Regardless he was an archbishop (just not in England!) and hence Marske has produced three archbishops over two centuries – one catholic and two protestant! A talk on the Three Archbishops of Marske, including George Errington, is to be found here.

A Catholic Chapel existed at Clints until 1839, however we cannot be sure whether this was located within Clints Hall, or was in a building independent of the Hall (perhaps what is now Chapel Cottage)²³. After 1839 the nearest Catholic place of worship would have been in Richmond. Of the Catholic familes living at Clints in the early nineteenth century none remained in the area after the chapel at Clints closed: not only had they lost their chapel, but some such as the butler would have lost their jobs at Clints Hall, and it is probable that they also lost their tenancies after the Hutton family become landlord. At some point after the demolition of Clints Hall in c1842, a building on the green at Clints became a place of Methodist worship and a three-sided apse was added (John Wesley, founder of methodism in England, had a preference for octagonal chapels – other examples include Heptonstall and Yarm²⁴). It remained a chapel for another 160 years until it closed in 2000.

Return to History pages

1. Wakefield Historical Publications. 1979. Samuel Buck’s Yorkshire Sketchbook.[↩]
2. Richmond Town Council. Webpage on Town Silver. Accessed 2023.[↩]
3. Hatcher, Jane. 2004. The History of Richmond. Blackthorn Press.[↩]
4. Fieldhouse, R and Jennings, B. 1978. A History of Richmond and Swaledale. A very detailed history of the area – 500 pages.[↩][↩]
5. Wikipedia. John Bathurst. Accessed 2023.[↩][↩]
6. Hatcher, Jane. 2004. The History of Richmond, North Yorkshire.[↩]
7. Fieldhouse, R and Jennings, B. 1978. A History of Richmond and Swaledale. Page 367.[↩]
8. Fieldhouse, R and Jennings, B. 1978. A History of Richmond and Swaledale. See page 214.[↩]
9. Waterson, Edward and Meadows, Peter. 1990. Lost Houses of York and the North Riding.[↩][↩]
10. Richardson, R. 1759. A Plan of the Clints Estate. Coloured estate plan in North Yorkshire County Archives, Ref ZAZ(M)3.[↩][↩]
11. Angus, W. 1787. The seats of the nobility and gentry in Great Britain and Wales.[↩]
12. Gins Genes. Orgate Farm in Swaledale Website. Accessed 2024[↩]
13. Raine, James. 1881. Marske in Swaledale. Yorkshire Archaelogical and Topographical Association Journal, Vol VI, p273.[↩]
14. James, Serenhedd. 2016. George Errington and Roman Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century England.[↩][↩][↩][↩][↩]
15. The National Archives. Non-parochial registers. RG4 piece 3404. The registers record around 12 baptisms in every 10 years from 1790 to 1830 – equating to an estimated catholic population of around 60 . Available at Ancestry.com, subscription website.[↩]
16. Find my past (https://www.findmypast.co.uk/). Subscription website – accessed 2023. Census data 1841 to 1939.[↩][↩]
17. Gloucestershire Echo.  27 June 1885.  Short article refering to George Errington (father).  Viewed at The British Newspaper Archive (BNA website) [↩]
18. Dublin Evening Telegraph.  31 October 1881.  An English Agent at the Court of Rome.  Viewed at The British Newspaper Archive (BNA website) [↩]
19. Wikipedia. George Errington. Accessed 2023.[↩]
20. Wikipedia. Neo-ultramontanes. Accessed 2023.[↩]
21. Church Times. A Victorian might-have-been: Geoffrey Rowell on the man Manning pipped to Westminster and a cardinal’s hat. 12 August 2016 and link[↩]
22. Find my past (https://www.findmypast.co.uk/). Subscription website – accessed 2023. 1871 census for Prior Park College, Bath.[↩]
23. The National Archives. Non-parochial registers. RG4 piece 3404. Available at Ancestry.com, subscription website.[↩]
24. Serjeant, I.. Accessed 2023. Website – Historic Methodist Architecture and its Protection.[↩]