AS you venture down the bank north out of Richmond towards Gilling West, you are confronted by an attention-grabbing triumphal arch with huge iron gates dedicated to Voltigeur, the horse which won the 1850 Derby and caused celebrations so all-consuming that a score of men drank themselves to death.

We drained every last drop out of that story last week, but the real reason we were going down the steep hill to Holmedale was a search for St Osythe.

Because next to the Voltigeur Arch is a track which leads to St Osythe Farm. These days, Osythe is an unusual name, although in centuries gone by, it was surprisingly common.

Osythe was a 7th Century girl from East Anglia who drowned in a beck but was miraculously revived after nuns spent three days praying for her. She married Frithewald, king of the East Saxons, but one day when he was out hunting, she ran away and joined a nunnery.

In AD653, her nunnery was attacked by Viking invaders. She came out to plead with them to behave but instead they sliced off her head. Where it fell to the ground, a holy spring of water miraculously sprung forth and, even more miraculously, she picked up her head, popped it under her arm and walked back to her nunnery.

Once inside the doors, she collapsed and died.

Her institution, St Osyth Priory, still stands near Clacton in Essex, where she also has a beach named after her. A spring on the Aske estate near Richmond was also dedicated to her, hence the name of the farm.

Why? No one knows, but the churches at Great Smeaton and Scruton are also dedicated to obscure saints, St Eloy and St Radegund, with no obvious local connections. Perhaps a soldier, far from home, prayed for a safe return, and when he made it back to North Yorkshire he was so grateful that he told everyone of the saints he had been praying to on his travels.

But it was not only in Richmond that the story of St Osythe (with or without a final e) had resonance.

Catherine Ryan’s lovely blog about the people of Teesdale, called bygone-teesdale-folk.org.uk, tells how more than 100 women in the Cotherstone and Romaldkirk area were baptised with variations of the name Osythe between the 16th and 19th Centuries.

The first was Sethe Jackson in 1579, and the last may well have been Sithy Ann Patterson, who hailed from Bowes and died in West Auckland in 1917.

Over the centuries in Teesdale, there were women called Sythe, Scythy, Scithe, Scithia and Scytha, although the most common form was Sythy. Is there anyone still living called Sythy, or something similar derived from Osythe?

One Sythy that Catherine’s blog talks about is Sythy Bourne, from Cotherstone, who, around 1774, married Thomas Binks of Bowes, and went to live with him on his remote farm of Stoney Keld.

They called their first son, born in 1775, Thomas and so when a daughter came along in 1779, it was only fair to call her Sythy. Sadly, this Sythy only lived until she was three.

Her brother Thomas had a colourful life. He became surveyor of taxes in Stockton, but regularly got himself into such serious debt that he was imprisoned. His creditors seem to have chased him from London to Edinburgh, often looking in at Stoney Keld, as he went by a variety of names: Thomas Barrett Binks, Thomas B Binks and Thomas Bingo Binks.

Indeed, such was the enormity of his debts that in 1836, the family farm at Stoney Keld had to be sold for £3,980 – that’s worth about £465,000 in today’s values, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator.

Even if it cleared Thomas’ debts, it didn’t do him much good because he died in Edinburgh of tuberculosis in 1837 – Catherine wonders whether he had caught TB while incarcerated in a debtors’ prison.

This must have caused his mother, Sythy, great heartache. Having been a widow for 43 years, she died in her 90s in 1839, and was buried in the Binks family tomb in Bowes churchyard.

WITH no family farm to inherit, Thomas Binks’ sons, Thomas and Richard had to make their own way in the world so they joined the East India Company. Richard made it home safely and lived out his days in Darlington, but Thomas, a gunner in the Bengal Fort Artillery, died in Dum Dum near Calcutta (now Kolkata) of “Dum Dum fever”, which we’d now recognise as malaria. He too is mentioned on the Binks memorial in Bowes churchyard.

STONEY KELD, on the moors between Cotherstone and Bowes, featured in these columns in January when a ruined Second World War tank, stuck in a bog, was drawn to our attention.

During the war, Stoney Keld’s remote land became RAF Bowes Moor, where mustard gas, phosgene and lewisite were stored. At the end of the war, large quantities of the chemicals were destroyed up there.