Ketton Ox: Animal & Pub, Pt 2 (NZ419129)

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The Ketton Ox public house, a fine-looking affair at No.100 High Street, Yarm, has a history stretching back, in various forms and under many names, some 400 years.  It must have enjoyed its fair share of custom during the town’s long reign as one of the region’s premier coaching stops – to say nothing of Yarm’s status as the Tees’ primary port before the rise of Stockton and Middlesbrough.

However, as elegant as it looks today, the establishment has dark associations with the once rampantly popular sport of cockfighting. Indeed the place was well-known for its gory gatherings when it was a legal pastime; but come a rather inconvenient change in the law in 1835, it had to move with the times… the landlord switching the venue to another room – conveniently fitted with a trapdoor to permit escape if the place was raided!

Being over four centuries old, the pub is, of course, haunted, with all manner of ghostly going-on, it would seem. Many put this down to the fact that the pub was once used as a morgue, primarily for bodies which, from time to time, found themselves floating lifeless in the River Tees.

Ketton Ox: Animal & Pub, Pt 1 (NZ419129)

The oldest inn / public house in Yarm is probably The Ketton Ox, neatly situated at No.100 High Street. It is named after the famous bull of the same name which is illustrated above.

This immense animal, better known in later life as the Durham Ox, lived during 1796-1807, and was an early example of what came to be known as the Shorthorn breed of cattle. Bred by Charles Colling of Ketton Hall, near Darlington, it hit the headlines after being exhibited in Darlington in 1799. In 1801, John Day bought the beast and renamed it the Durham Ox, showing it to gawping crowds far and wide across the land – spending most of 1802 in London alone.

Its weight was variously given as 171 stone – 270 stone, but its bulk was to prove its undoing when, in February 1807, it damaged its hip getting out of a carriage and had to be slaughtered several weeks later. It was said to be 189 stone dead weight.

Its legacy lives on in many an etching and painting (its image was even set in porcelain) – and in dozens of pub names around the world. Astonishingly, a town in Australia is even named after it.