Back from Yorkshire pilgrimage
As much of the countryside between Middlesbrough and Whitby seems to have been designated the “Captain Cook Heritage Trail” we decided that our own travels this week constituted the Joseph Potter Heritage Trail. We had a full and rewarding time with excellent weather and I’m sure that John and Marion will both have something to say about their impressions.
Please note: below images may not display if you haven’t logged into your forum account. Please do so here.
What delighted us all was the discovery that Stokesley and Great Ayton are still delightful towns with sufficient landmarks to enable us to appreciate how things looked in the 1770s and 80s. Although both are probably a lot smarter and cleaner now, they have been spared significant Victorian and 20th century development, which might have changed them entirely. The eastern approach to the town from College Square is dominated by the mid-Victorian Town Hall set on the western side of a spacious piazza known as The Plain and extending to the 18th century Manor House on the east side. Flanked by three or four storey Georgian shops and inns, Stokesley offers a welcoming aspect.
Behind the rectangular Town Hall block is a smaller, cobbled space, which was the ancient Market Place. A pattern in the ground and a blue plaque on a nearby wall, reminds us that here stood the old market cross. It was badly damaged in an anti-papist riot around 1747 but not finally destroyed until it became the centre of a huge bonfire set up to celebrate Admiral Rodney’s 1779 naval victory at Gibraltar.
- Stokesley’s Toll Booth 2009
Facing the Market Place and with its back to the spot where the Town Hall now stands was the former Toll Booth and Butter Market. A sketch made from an old painting shows arched doorways to the Butter Market on the ground floor and a ladder to the upstairs Toll Booth, where every person leaving Stokesley carrying a basket or parcel had to pay a toll of one penny. Also kept here was the steelyard, a steel rod one yard in length used to standardise the traders’ measuring sticks and other weights and measures.
In his memoirs, Joseph Potter records that his parents kept a common bakehouse, where the family lived, “our house stood fully a quarter of a mile from the entrance of the town, and it stood alone, separate from any other house, only adjoined the Toll Booth in the market place nearly in the centre of the town.” The old painting shows a shop (in the nineteenth century a hatters) built onto the south end of the Toll Booth, whilst behind this – on the south-east side there is another small shop still extant. The whole block has undergone many structural changes and it is not known what stood to the back (east side) of the Toll Booth, where the Town Hall now stands, but it seems highly probable that one of these was the Potter family’s common bakehouse.
- Another possibility for the Common Bakehouse, sandwiched between the Toll Booth (left) and the Victorian Town Hall (right)
It was here that Joseph was born in 1769 and passed his first decade until his mother died and he went to live with his aunt at Great Ayton. He would have grown up in the heart of this flourishing market town, where he would have witnessed all the comings and goings as well as the sufferings of the petty malefactors who would have been placed in the stocks or whipping post, which also stood in front of the Toll Booth; although the damaged Market Cross still had a few more months left after Joseph moved from Stokesley.
