How infamous heir to hall scandalised Longdendale Valley
LIVING at Bleak House, Crowden for 28 years I always felt as though we were rooted in history, as everywhere I looked, each place that I walked to, and every soft spot I sat on, resonated with old voices - and they spoke very clearly to me that this was indeed a special place.
I am indebted to an old friend, Alan Walmsley, for this picture of the long-gone Crowden Hall from the turn of the 20th Century; an absolute belter of a photograph for many reasons, not least, because it shows what a beautiful building it was, the postie who must have cycled from the nearest Sorting Office in Hadfield five miles away, and especially for the tantalising glimpses through the open windows.
Little is left of the hall, which was demolished in 1937, except for a few old foundations and the water trough at the cross-roads between the campsite and Old Rifle Range; many a time I sat there conjuring up images from days past.
Crowden Hall was built in 1692 by Thomas Hadfield, who died in 1697. The Hadfield line continued there to Thomas (1735-1804), the builder’s great grandson. At some stage the Hadfield surname appears to have been changed, or mistakenly recorded, as Hatfield.
It was Thomas’s son John (1756-1803) who was hanged at Carlisle Jail in 1803 after scandalising the valley, and indeed the whole country, with his antics. It had all began well enough, Universityeducated with a bright future, but it all went wrong as John became hooked on gambling, women and his ultimate downfall, deception.
He must have had a certain charm as he was initially married to a lady from the landed gentry. However, he would live to regret his dalliance and short bigamous marriage to Mary Robinson, better known as ‘The Maid of Buttermere’, mentioned in Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’, and latterly the subject of Melvyn Bragg’s 1987 novel, The Maid of Buttermere.
This maid was a shepherdess and the daughter of the landlord of the Fish Inn in the village of Buttermere in Cumbria. It was in 1802 that she was wooed by Hatfield, who presented himself as ‘Colonel Hope’.
The marriage of the celebrated local beauty to the brother of an earl (as he claimed) was widely reported, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in the London Morning Post of ‘The romantic marriage’.
Hatfield was exposed as an impostor, bigamist and forger, and was arrested and escaped before being captured once again in South Wales.
He was tried at Carlisle for forging a cheque and impersonating an officer, both capital offences in 1803, and the rope awaited. It was reported at the time that Hatfield had the misfortune to be assigned a trainee hangman, and he was forced to tell him exactly where to place the ‘knot’ to ensure a swift end.
There was a legend in the valley that Hadfield had visited a well-known ‘Soothsayer’ at Brushes, at midnight, on one New Year’s Eve. The story goes that when the young man asked to be told his future, the old man looked him in the eye and said, ‘Fate’s resist-less hand, will seal your fate in Cumberland.’
I wrote to Melvyn Bragg, as there was no mention of this prophecy in his novel, and he told me that he had not heard about it, otherwise it would have been included.
Bragg’s research on Hatfield had stopped when his parish was given as Mottram in the records of the Newgate Gaol where he had been imprisoned.
Unknown to Bragg, the Hadfield family would have attended St James Chapel at Crowden, which had been built originally over 500 years ago as a, ‘Chapel of Ease’, enabling the locals to attend services in the valley.