Makeno bones about famous discovery

The best known is Kirkdale near Kirkbymoorside and the other stretches for about a mile north from Ebberston Hall, near Scarborough. The third was on the moors above Whitby. As all their names suggest, each was a small valley – a dale - with a kirk, i.e. an old church.

The Kirkdale near Kirkbymoorside is well known due to its famous cave and ancient minster. The cave became internationally known due to an unexpected discovery in March 1821. A workman quarrying stone for road materials on the cliff near Kirkdale Minster suddenly found himself looking into the entrance of a deep cave. It was several feet above ground and can be seen today from the road.

When he looked inside, he saw the floor covered with old bones but he did not think they were of interest to anyone and so he threw a lot away, most falling into the river below.

By chance, John Gibson was passing during his holiday in Helmsley and noticed the bones, instantly realising they were of great importance.

He alerted a leading local palaeontologist, Dr William Buckland, who knew they had come from animals that lived some 70,000 years before Christ.

Furthermore, they came from species that no longer existed in the wild within the British Isles, having lived in a warm, sub-tropical climate.

He soon identified bones from the lion, tiger, hippopotamus, bison, giant deer, straight-tusked elephant and slender-nosed rhinoceros. His discovery of 300 hyena bones indicated the cave had once been a hyenas’ den, and the distinctive gnawing on the bones confirmed that.

A thick layer of sediment established that this cave, now 175 feet above sea level (but only a few feet above ground level) had once been on the shores of the mighty Lake Pickering, which would have flooded it on occasions.

When the lake gradually receded, the cave was left high and dry with its entrance blocked.

When all the surviving bones were examined, they were found to include those of the wolf, fox, brown bear, cave bear, stoat, lion, spotted hyena, mouse, water vole, Abbot’s vole, shorttailed field vole, brown hare, rabbit, slender-nosed rhinoceros, woolly rhinoceros, horse, pig, hippopotamus, reindeer, red deer, giant deer, European bison, wild ox, straight-tusked elephant and mammoth. Some were from the so-called warm period and others from the cold period of our ancient history.

Many bones were placed within museums but a lot were lost, some even being mixed with road-making materials. However, one puzzle remains – did man ever set foot in that cave to see those beasts? Or, in 1821, was that workman the first human to set foot in the famous Kirkdale Cave?

Not quite so ancient but historic nonetheless is the pre- Reformation Kirkdale Minster, known to have been in ruins before 1066. A longsurviving sundial and inscription above the door provides much information.

It says “Orm, the son of Gamal, bought St Gregory’s Church when it was utterly broken and fallen, and caused it to be made anew from the ground, to Christ and St Gregory in the days of King Edward and in the days of Earl Tosti. Hawarth wrought me and Brand the priest.”

The St Gregory mentioned here is Pope Gregory the Great but the King Edward is not Edward I of England but one of three Saxon kings of that name, and it seems that Hawarth carved the sundial and inscription.

The second Kirkdale also boasts an old church and a cave. St Mary’s Church is about half a mile from the village of Ebberston and has portions dating to the late 12th and 13th century.

Much of its ancient stonework was lost during extensive rebuilding and restoration in 1876 although parts of some old coffin lids are visible in the outer walls and there is a mysterious blocked arch to the south of the nave.

To the north are Scamridge Dykes and ancient burial mounds along with a cave known either as Ilfrid’s Cave or King Alfred’s Cave, said to be where Alfred, King of Northumbria, sheltered after his battle with Oswin.

Also to the north there is a small dale known as Rosekirk Dale.

The third Kirkdale does not appear on modern maps because it was renamed Church Dale, probably by Ordnance Survey mapmakers in 1843. It also possesses an ancient church of St Hilda, formerly Catholic but now Anglican and serving as the mortuary chapel of Egton. The renaming of places may have occurred as Ordnance Survey officials tried to eradicate vernacular and sometimes obscure names, or when trying to avoid confusion with several places bearing the same name – i.e. Kirkdale!

Tomorrow, August 24, is the feast day of St Bartholomew, when old pieces of Yorkshire weather lore tell us that autumn begins. One says St Bartholomew brings the dew and another supports this by saying “As is St Bartholomew’s Day, so is the entire autumn”. Shepherds of former times believed that if St Bartholomew’s Day began with a mist and a hoar frost, then cold weather would follow with a hard winter waiting ahead.

It is also the day when the 40 days of rain that might have started on St Swithin’s (July 15) are supposed to come to an end. An old saying told us: “All the tears that St Swithin can cry, St Bartlemy’s mantle can wipe dry.” Bartlemy is an old variation of Bartholomew.

On St Bartholomew’s Day, many towns and village used to hold giant fairs, sometimes known as Bartle Fairs, and one is the Wensleydale village of West Witton.

Its parish church is dedicated to St Bartholomew and for centuries the village has celebrated its own saint’s day with the St Bartholomew’s Fair, better known today as Witton Feast.

It involves the curious custom of burning an effigy of Old Bartle, which marks the end of the celebrations. Noone is quite sure who Bartle really was – it is hardly likely the village would burn an effigy of its patron saint, and one theory is that Bartle was the name of a horse thief who is annually punished for his crimes. Another theory is that the custom dates to pagan times when the last sheaf of corn to be harvested was burnt ceremoniously to destroy the evil Corn Spirit.

Yet another theory is that Bartle is a local name for an ancient sun deity called Baal.

Whatever the theories and history of this remarkable custom, I hope everyone has a great time, and that it does not rain.

Following my earlier notes on black rabbits (D&S Times, June 21), I have received an e-mail from a correspondent who lives in France. He writes about finding a small black rabbit dead in his garden, followed later by another. Their small size and unusual colour caused him to wonder about their origins but adds that his brother-in-law, who lives in Cumbria, referred to the small black rabbits as deakins.

He is not sure whether this is the right spelling, but wonders if it is a dialect word for these rabbits. I have checked my Yorkshire dialect dictionaries because our dialects are very similar, but I have not found the word, nor does it appear in my dictionary of Lakeland dialect.