Coast to Coast Stage 4: Reeth to Ingleby Arncliffe

Steps built by Norman nuns to go to mass

From Reeth to Richmond, we continued down the Swale valley, sometimes dropping down to admire Muker where they filmed the James Herriott TV series, or climbing up on to the moors past derelict houses for sale. Richmond, however, was booming. The French and Italian restaurants were doing a roaring trade, although the shops weren’t as busy as they should be. Everyone was at the railway station, a Victorian gem, renovated with film theatres, restaurants and a swimming pool. No trains, but the track bed makes a pleasant walk to Easby Abbey, another of Henry VIII’s nationalizations. 

Richmond has been a garrison town since the Romans built their camp at nearby Catterick to guard the northern route from York to Hadrian’s Wall. Catterick is now the largest Army base in Europe. It was well hidden by high hedges when we went past, but the sounds of clanking tank treads and shouting men carried nevertheless. The Normans thought Richmond was a good place from which to intimidate the locals, so William the Bastard asked his brother to set up a castle to do just that. While the Norman keep has fallen into disuse, the adjacent building was used to house 18 conscientious objectors in the First World War – probably the same streak of independent bloody mindedness that bred the strong influence of non-conformists in this part of the country.

Richmond has the only surviving Georgian theatre

Stage setting at the Georgian theatre

that was showing Taming of the Shrew while we were there. The audience sits in stalls, boxes or gallery pretty much around the stage. The stage is equipped with trapdoors and a removable bit to allow a small orchestra pit. He audience floor plan is a horseshoe with sides of perhaps 25 meters. Lighting by candle replicas and the gallery so stuffy and hot, Gordon had to leave. There were perhaps 180 in the audience, but originally it held 400! Plays could not be presented in the 1780s without express permission of the Lord Chancellor, but the entrepreneur who built a small chain of Yorkshire theatres advertised musical entertainment, for which the audience paid, interspersed by political plays for which they didn’t.

Then two days of road –bashing across the wide Vale of Mowbray. Large fields of barley or wheat, huge tractors and machinery, and a few paddocks of sheep or cows Excellent B&B at Richmond and good ones since, with meals at the wonderful British institution of the pub. Usually steak, steak & ale, sausages, etc. More dissolved abbeys and priories at Easby, Ingleby and Richmond itself. A gem of a church near Richmond with recently uncovered Norman period frescoes.

Norman fresco of the nativity