CITiZAN - Blogs - A Stroll Around Beadnell

A Stroll Around Beadnell

01/02/2017 | Angus Stephenson

According to William Weaver Tomlinson, writing in his “Comprehensive Guide to Northumberland” in 1888, Beadnell was “a good-sized fishing-village, planted down on the flat, green, sandy sward, about a quarter of a mile from the sea and sheltered by a band of trees. Beadnell Square, a collection of cottages under a continuous quadrangular roof, lies between it and the rocky shore. The occupation of the villagers is well seen by the drawn-up cobles, the outspread nets, the lobster-pots lying about in heaps, the sheds, constructed of old fishing-boats as receptacles for the yarns and lines and other fishing gear, and the big cauldrons, with stumpy chimneys for heating the tar.” Traditionally the main occupations of the villagers were fishing and agriculture.

Beadnell Harbour and fishing boats

Although the scale of the fishing industry is much smaller than it used to be, there is evidence for it at all over the village. Katrina Porteous has written a Citizan blog entry on one aspect, the black fishing huts still to be seen along the shore (“The Reading Room, Beadnell,” 20/06/2016). Before the advent of man-made fibres, one routine fishing-industry activity was the treatment of natural ropes, sails and nets by the use of “bark-pots”, for boiling up tar and tannin-rich solutions using tree-bark, the cauldrons and chimneys of Tomlinson’s description. This messy business was usually carried on at a distance from habitation, although the bark-pots in the picture below would have been near the fishermen’s cottages of Beadnell Square. These are now Grade II listed structures. Citizan volunteers recorded a similar feature in 2016 at Seahouses, a few miles to the north.

Bark-pots at Beadnell

The oldest part of Beadnell is the headland known locally as Ebb’s Nook (and with various other name and spellings), where, according to Tomlinson “were discovered in 1853, the remains of an ancient chapel, which had for a long-time been buried in a sand-drift…The chapel , which must formerly have stood at a much greater distance from the sea, is supposed to be of thirteenth century workmanship, occupying the site of a chapel erected in the seventh century by, or in memory of, the Saxon princess Ebba, sister of Oswald, King of Northumbria.” The chapel and its eroding burials provided the starting-point for an episode of Channel 4’s “Time Team” in 2012. The headland is also the location of the earliest known lime-kiln in the village, excavated in 1994 and archaeomagnetically-dated to c 1480-1520 AD.

CITiZAN Volunteer at the early lime-kiln at Ebb's Nook

The production and transportation of lime was for many years a key industrial activity along this part of the Northumberland coast. Lime is one of the main ingredients for building mortar and was used in many other processes, such as leather preparation, but in this area its commercial development was largely attributable to better understanding of potential improvements to agricultural land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Huge quantities were dug into soil to reduce its acidity, thereby improving its value as arable land. Bulk carriage of lime was often carried out by sea, sometimes up the east coast to Edinburgh and points north, with the result that many lime-kilns were built during this period close to the shore. There are surviving examples nearby at Seahouses and Holy Island, as well as Beadnell. Lime production was carried out extensively at Dell point, Beadnell, and coal-mining took place locally to provide fuel for firing the kilns.

Limestone workings at Dell Point, Beadnell

Thomas Wood was an entrepreneur who bought land in Beadnell in the early eighteenth century. In 1747 he leased some of his land to George Turnbull from another coastal village, Cambois, with permission to build lime-kilns there. In 1759, Wood commissioned a map of his estate from James Robertson of Alnwick and this shows a set of four lime-kilns at Dell Point, with a windmill on the headland nearby. Parts of the remains of these kilns were recorded by Citizan volunteers in summer 2016, where they are being eroded out of the cliffs; they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to winter coastal storm surges.

18th-century lime-kiln at Dell Point, Beadnell

John Wood, the son of Thomas, was similarly entrepreneurial and after his father had taken back the leases for the kilns at Dell Point after 40 years, he made a similar arrangement for the construction of a new set of kilns to be built at more-or-less the same time as the new harbour, the harbour which can be seen in the village today. These kilns were begun in 1798 and were recently featured in the first episode of the Channel 4 TV series, “Britain at Low Tide”. The harbour kilns are one of the most conspicuous monuments in the village but the industry was relatively short-lived and was finished by 1850, after a short revival in the 1840s. Nowadays these kilns are mostly used for storing fishing gear.

The early 19th-century lime-kilns and harbour at Beadnell

The main industry in Beadnell nowadays is tourism and the village doubles in population size in summer, particularly with visitors to the two large nearby camping and caravanning sites, which brings other pressures and environmental effects, in addition to the sometimes fierce climate. The remains along this stretch of coast are very vulnerable. The harbour and lime-kilns need repeated maintenance. Ebb’s Nook, for instance, is regularly battered with storms and is visibly eroding and will eventually be washed away, eventually…but not for a while yet.