Muggleswick Grange

Muggleswick Grange was a happy accidental find! We were marvelling over the Old Engine House at Shildon, tucked away up a higgledy-piggledy road in Blanchland, and read about Muggleswick Grange being another consolidated building, part of the 'Living North Pennines Project'. So, we added it to the day's To Do list!

Crossing the countryside between Blanchland and Edmundbyers it was a day of dramatic skies and wide moorland views. We are fortunate to have all this just a stone's throw away in most directions from where we live.

And March is optimum time to wind down your window or walk amidst the moors to hear the calls of returning curlew, lapwing, golden plover and red grouse with their familiar 'Go back, go back, go back' call. We were even treated to the close quarters' acrobatics of a heart-shaped faced crepuscular barn owl, watching us, watching it!

Heading down a gated lane and passing through the tightly packed Priory Farmstead, we noted the late 18th century barn with distinctive arrow slit vents. Barns around the Northumberland/Durham are ten a penny, but this one was distinctive, adding to the air of investigative mystery here at Muggleswick, and probably built with stone plundered from the Grange over the centuries.

Then on through an open gate to the imposing vision of Muggleswick Grange, now a towering roadside ruin. The significance of this building is hard to measure at first glance. Its features are few and far between. It stands, incongruous amidst agricultural buildings and farm houses, but you can tell it's something special.

The word Grange is of French origin and comes from the Latin word granica, in French graunge, which means a granary.

Built for the prior of Durham in the mid 1200s, the structure of the grange would have been much bigger and would have originally stood in the grounds of parkland. A grange was a farm which was owned and worked by the monastic community, hence the modern name of Priory Farm. It would have provided food and materials for the nearby monastic house, and what was left would have been sold at market to raise funds for those living at the monastery.

This illustration from Altogether Archaeology's Muggleswick Grange Excavation Project Design shows the building would have been more extensive with one 1464 document recording evidence of a great hall with a chapel, a farm, a dairy and great stocks of cattle, calves, oxen, sheep, pigs and lambs. The Bolden Book or the Boldon Buke was a huge survey done in 1183 to assist with the administration of aaaaaallllllllll of the lands, goods and chattels of the Bishop of Durham, similar to the Doomsday Book.

People in these places were ordered to pay tax to the Bishop of Durham and not directly to The King. It was the first survey north of the Tees and Muggleswick was recorded then as Muglingwyc. Other post conquest documents refer to it as Moclyngeswyk, Muklingwyk, and Myglkynwyc, all seem like the long words that teachers used to put on the blackboard on rainy playtimes where you had to see how many smaller words out of one longer word!

The Boldon Book reveals that the head monk of Durham Cathedral would have farmed extensive lands here on the territory originally owned by the Bishop of Durham, but handed down to the Prior who exchanged it for land and the Manor of Hardwick near Castle Eden. 160 acres of land here were granted a license by the Bishop to use to cultivate and farm, and so, Muggleswick Grange grew into a thriving community where in 1229, a document refers to a 'domum magnam' - a large house having been constructed probably of timber.

Then by the 1260s, documents show a larger stone building having been erected as a place of worship for the monks. It is the ruins of this great building that are still visible today.

This image from Altogether Archaeology's Muggleswick Grange Excavation Project Design shows the Grange as it would have looked around the year 1900.

Largely all that is left is the west gable wall. The wall would have belonged to the chapel, and looking up, we could see the remains of a small 15th century religious looking window, which looked to have been blocked up by a chimney flue and built over during the centuries.

You can see the corresponding fireplace on the other side of the gable, now home to a rook's nest. A corvid des-res! Look at the fancy intersecting stone tracery work. I wonder what the window would have looked like in all its glassy resplendence.

It's in an unusual setting, coming down off the bracken covered hills opposite Edmundbyers. It would have been quite a sight in the middle of nowhere. So significant is the overall aesthetic of Muggleswick Grange that Northern Powergrid have committed to taking the overhead power cables underground to help preserve the overall vista of the ruin and conserve its status as a conservation area.

The main remains of the building are essentially two rectangular mega buttresses protruding from the main body of the building. It's suggested that the Grange potentially stood two or three stories high, and these were probably functional in keeping the whole shebang upright.

The Eastern gable is largely intact and is 15.5 meters high...it's a long way up from the bottom! We could see sturdy projecting turrets, unfussy in design with machicolations in between the corbels. These little pokey holes would have been used to pour hot oil, boiling water, hot sand or quicklime through, or to throw stones, or to aim arrows through to the baddies below.

But it's perhaps the bits we can't see and which are all underground that hold the most significance. Investigations into the archaeology of the site took place in the 1890s and further work in the early 2000s, where each stone was drawn by hand to record its positioning. In this dig, the cobbled floors of stables were revealed and a number of significant carved architectural stones. Trenches were dug which revealed details of the much larger structure measuring 10.7 meters by 40.5 meters.

Remains of monastic granges from this era are scarce, so these remains at Muggleswick hold great significance as examples of a genre and time long gone with minimal record.

The light was failing and there was a church calling to be explored, in the distance, so a return to Muggleswick Grange is back on the To Do list. Always more to see. Always more to learn.

The Grange is a Grade I listed building.