Thirkleby Rattle
Start / End: St Mary ‘s Church, West Lutton
Distance: 2.1 miles
Time: 1 hour
Map: OS 300
A nice short walk, with a couple of stiles at the start that can be crawled under by dogs and a bit of road walking at the end.
The Walk
Starting From : YO17 8TA /// paddle.point.beads
1. Park on the roadside outside St Mary’s Church, which you can visit on your return if you have time, as it contains some beautiful arts and crafts decoration from the 1870’s. With the church on your right walk to the corner, past Clara’s Cottage, and cross the road to the footpath sign., with Sheepwalk Lane coming in from the left.
You will pass along the Gypsey Race Stream as you walk through the village, which is the most northerly of the Wold’s chalk streams and is associated with medieval settlements and many legends. According to folklore, when the Gypsey Race is flowing in flood (The Woe Waters), bad fortune is at hand. It was in flood in the year before the Great Plague of 1665–66, the restoration of Charles II (1660) and the landing of William of Orange (1688), before both World War I and II, plus the bad winters of 1947 and 1962.
2. Walk straight ahead between two high hedges, where you will spot a stile in front of you, which dogs can crawl under, thankfully.
3. Just after the stile, don’t make our mistake and paddle across the stream to your left, instead turn right and negotiate the second stile which again Bill crawled through.
4. Turn up left to walk along the field edge, which when we were there was pretty overgrown. Continue along the edge with the Gypsey Race on your left up to Thirkleby Manor.
The deserted medieval settlement of Thirkleby, according to the Domesday Book, was divided between two manors. Before 1066 the largest of these was held by Easdgifu, who was described as a considerable beauty. Easdgifu, Ealdgyth, Aldgyth or Edith in modern English, was the daughter of Ælfgar, son of Lady Godiva or Godgifu who was exiled on the charge of treason in 1055 by Edward the Confessor, at which point Ælfgar married her to Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, King of Wales. When Grffudd was killed in Harold Godwinson's invasion of Wales in 1063, she became Harold's wife. But Ealdgyth was soon widowed again, as in October 1066, Harold was defeated by the forces of William the Conqueror and died in the Battle of Hastings. At which point Ealdgyth's brothers sent her to Chester for shelter, and she disappears from history.
5. Just before the farm the path heads right across the bottom of the field (note- don't enter the farm yard as we did!). Make your way over to the hedge, find the gap and cross straight over the road.
6. You will see a public bridleway sign buried in the hedge on the other side of the road and you just take the bridle way straight ahead, again keeping to the edge of the field on your right. You are now on Thirkleby Rattle and I thought that I would look into why this area is called this, but all I can find is this:
Rattles date back to the first half of the 14th century when the cog rattle gave out a distinctive sound and was used by women to call their husbands in the fields. Rattles were also used by villagers to warn others of the arrival of plague victims, travelling merchants used them to signal their presence, while others used rattles to ward off birds.
7. At the end of the field, the original path ends up in loads of weeds and nettles, therefore its best to veer off right towards the gap in the hedge at Malton Lane.
8. Turn right onto the road (Bill and I did think that we could go left and then head up and through Thirkleby Warren, but the path goes to there and from there but not through there, and there are signs up saying you definitely can't walk through this property, so we came all the way back again. And seeing as we saw a sign to say 'Fly Tippers would be shot' we thought it best to stick to the proper paths!
Anyway, turning right on the road, you can follow this all the way back to West Lutton. If you want you can turn off when you reach the right-hand road turning and head across the field back to the stiles that we encountered at the start, but as the field was planted when we were there and had no path evident, we just walked back along the road.
If you have time, pay a visit to St Mary's Church here which was designed by architect George Edmund Street for Sir Tatton Sykes II. It cost £13,125 to build, a large amount in the day, which shows just how much Sir Tatton was prepared to spend on the building’s ornamentation and furnishings. This extravagance attracted a certain amount of scorn at the time:
'altogether too much for the architect’s good. The design is very full of incident, like an elaborate demonstration model. Relentless variety in buttressing gives up only at the west end. Relentless variety of window pattern, indeed of window type matches this, circles, a spherical triangle, tall Decorated, squat Decorated, grouped lancets. It is a measure of Street’s skill that this almost Woodyerian profusion of disparate motifs is welded into some sort of unity.'
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