The Slaying of the Chillingham Bull (NU075255)

The wild white cattle which roam the huge expanse of Chillingham Park are perhaps the region’s most treasured natural curiosity. But they are not to be messed with, for they really are genuinely wild. Of ancient descent (no one knows quite how old), they have remained hemmed in and protected, yes, but you wouldn’t want to casually wander across the park amongst them… for there’s a pretty good chance they’d have a go at you.

Though they are undomesticated and quite often aggressive, they are very, very special specimens. Numbering around 100, they are rarer than pandas and genetically identical to one another, such is the depth of their inbreeding. They are the purest of pure-breds, and are therefore very carefully looked after and highly prized by us North-Easterners.

However, despite their importance they have not always been as well protected as they are today. Amazingly, as recently as October 1872, the prize Chillingham Bull was slain in the name of sport by Edward, Prince of Wales.

His Royal Highness was at the time being entertained at Chillingham Castle by The Earl of Tankerville, when it was announced that to mark the occasion he would shoot the ‘noblest specimen of the herd.’ So on the morning of 17^th October 1872 he set out across the nearby park hidden in the hay cart that was carrying the poor animals their breakfast. As the herd congregated for their feed, it wasn’t especially difficult for the royal rifle to pick out the unsuspecting male in question, and the magnificent beast was soon exterminated:

His Royal Highness brought down the king of the herd by a single rifle shot, his bullet entering the neck and severing the spinal cord. It was a fine bull, seven years old, and weighing 70st.
[The Illustrated London News, Nov 16 1872]

It was, as was later reported, “scarcely a feat to warrant any unusual jubilation”, yet the ‘achievement’ was captured for posterity by a photographer when the beast was shoved under the royal foot on the castle lawn later that day. The sketch shown above was copied from the said snap and published in The Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore & Legend in March 1889.

The bull’s head was mounted and found its way to the hall at Sandringham in Norfolk. Is it, I wonder, still there?

Hepburn Bastle (NU071249)

© Copyright Russel Wills and licensed for reuse 

under this Creative CommonsLicence.

You don’t have to meander through the history of Northumberland for very long before you stumble over the terms bastle, pele tower and fortified house. The raiding Scots and the fraught inter-family feuding saw to it that anyone who had anything worth stealing would do their best to keep out the wandering baddies with the construction of these stone-built strongholds.

Hepburn Bastle, though, is a curious affair. Situated at the southern end of Chillingham Park, it has defied accurate categorisation since its (probable) late 14^th century creation. Described now as a ‘bastle’, it is more accurately a ‘fortified medieval tower house’. Though ‘tower’ is stretching it a bit, fortified it most certainly is. To complicate matters, buildings were added to it in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries – extensions which have since disappeared. Though it may have been built in the 1300s, it first appears in the records in 1509 as, simply, a ‘hold’, then pops up as a ‘tower’ in 1542, and by 1564 it is described as a ‘mansion house’.

Its dimensions are impressive. It measures 16.6m by 10.8m, is still three levels high despite being a ruin for an awfully long time and sports walls which are 2.7m thick at basement level. The ground floor comprises a barrel-vaulted basement with a later fireplace in the north wall – almost as if it was originally used (as in a bastle) to protect livestock, then later converted for human use – and at the east end a doorway leads to a mural chamber. The first floor has/had three rooms, each with a fireplace. The attic level, now minus its roof, has traces of fireplaces, windows and a window seat. Both the upper floors had their windows added after the Border region had quietened down somewhat – and were connected by a spiral staircase.

Though it is now known as Hepburn Bastle the original name was almost certainly Hebburn or Heburn – as is evidenced by its description in a 1715 survey as “a handsome house bellonging to Robert Heburn, esq.” (the ‘p’ was, we think, somewhat mysteriously introduced by the Ordnance Survey). The structure appears to have fallen from use around 250 years ago after the last Hebburn male heir died.