Tag: Heath Village

The Lady Abbess

Lady Abbess

We generally used to go into the Church yard, and look with some awe at the Nun’s graves, the earliest of which were already there, the Old Hall at Heath being the Nunnery : this brings to mind an incident some years later, when the youth and beauty of the Nuns of Heath excited a good deal of interest in the neighbourhood. One sultry summer’s afternoon my cousin Ben and I, took a boat from Wakefield down the river, and coming under the shelter of the wood at Heath, made fast our boat and strolled in the grounds. We had not been long there before we heard footsteps, and concealing ourselves behind a tree, saw a long line of Nuns, two and two, approaching us, preceded by the Lady Abbess. We were very much struck by the youthful and beautiful appearance of the young ladies, and my cousin unable to repress some slight exclamation, we were at once discovered by the Lady Abbess, and at a signal from her, each beautiful face was instantly concealed, by the drawing down of a veil, and a retrograde motion immediately commenced by all except the old lady, who came forward in great indignation, speaking angrily in French, of which neither of us understood a word. We of course remained silent. She then broke out, and rated us soundly, in English, in good set terms too, and we retired, making the best excuses we could, the object for which we had really gone, having been obtained.

Henry Clarkson, Memories of Merry Wakefield, 1887

At the east end of Kirkthorpe Church, a row of plain headstones mark the graves of Benedictine nuns who fled the French Revolution to live in exile at Heath Old Hall between 1811 and 1821. The inscriptions give only initials and dates but one records a name, perhaps she had yet to take her vows;

Emilia Monteiro
Born at Lisbon
Died July 3rd
1816
Aged 15

Dame Mary Bolles

Dame Mary Bolles

Dame Mary Bolles was born in the reign of Elizabeth I and died, aged 81, on 5 May 1662, in the reign of Charles II. She remains the only woman to have been awarded a baronetcy, in her case the Baronetcy of Nova Scotia, bestowed on her by Charles I in 1635.

water tower

She’s probably best known in Wakefield for the Water Tower, which she had constructed to pump a water supply up to Heath Old Hall. There are suggestions that it also supplied Heath Village and possibly an ironworks.

Dame Mary Bolles

I haven’t found a portrait of her, other than the effigy on her memorial in Ledston Church, so these are my attempts to imagine her as a cavalier lady at the time she became a baronet(ess?). The terms of her will called on her executors to open the Hall to guests and to slaughter as many of her fat sheep and cattle as necessary for the funeral feasting, which was to last six weeks. According to some accounts, she also stipulated that a particular room in the house should be left locked until 50 years after her death.

The Old Hall fell into ruin after being used as a supply store during World War II, but the original door of Dame Mary’s room, reputedly a haunted door, can be seen in Wakefield Museum.

Heath Tea Rooms

ALTHOUGH IT’S less than a mile from Wakefield, Heath village at the top end of Heath Common, has a timeless rural feel. I don’t know another village that’s quite like it. It’s got a couple of big Georgian houses but it isn’t an estate village, it’s more random looking than that, but as it is almost all stone-built, it blends together.

Kings Arms Cottages, where the Heath Tea Rooms opened five weeks ago, overlooks the village green. For that matter the whole village overlooks the one green space or another. It’s a useful place to bring my mum, who can’t walk too far these days, for a relaxing cup of coffee but it would also be a good stop on a hike because it’s near the Trans-Pennine Trail and half a dozen footpaths radiate from the village.

My Papermate Tikky Graphic Rotring pen let me down by blotting the paper; I suspect that the heat of the sun was the cause, causing the ink to expand. But my mum suggested that the blot added a certain something to the drawing. If that’s so then I’ve got an additional feature for my next two drawings as the ink soaked through the next two pages of my sketchbook.