THERE are “leazes” all over the country. The word used to mean the common meadow, where a local ‘goodwife’ could turn out her little dun cow to graze freely after the hay had been harvested.
Across the meadow from the cache is 'The Leazes' is a mid-Victorian mansion – one of the finest in Hexham, and the facede was designed by the famous neo-classical architect, John Dobson.
The house we see was built in 1853 for William Kirsopp. Could he have been the same brave William Kirsopp who dived into the River Derwent in 1846 to rescue the two small sons of Robert Lynn, boss of the Derwenthaugh Lampblack Works?
The record goes that Lynn minor, aged five, fell in first and Lynn major tried to pull him out, but also ended up afloat. The little lads were going down for the third time when Kirsopp galloped up, plunged into the foaming torrent and hauled them both to safety.
William Kirsopp – early Baywatch bod or not – was a member of a family which had long set the pace in Hexham.
The main Kirsopp seat used to be The Spital on the site of Hexham’s 12th century leper hospital of St Giles. The poor and leprous had to find somewhere else to be ill after 1537, when St Giles Hospital became a house upon Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.
If James Kirsopp considered that his family owed an ancient debt to the invalids of Hexham, he paid it in full in 1816, because he was one of five local men who launched a sort of early health service for the town.
The ‘Hexham Dispensary’ was set up in a house near Hallbank “to afford medical assistance to those who, having barely sufficient for their common maintenance, are unable in case of sickness to bear any additional expense”.
Kirsopp’s gesture appears to have had an impact. Though typhus fever raged throughout the North-East region shortly after, “the populous town of Hexham has rarely been more healthy”, noted an inspector.
The Kirsopp clout came from landowning. A glance at the Hexham map of 1826 shows strip after strip marked with the owner’s name ‘Kirsopp’. As well as James K, there was John K, and even Miss K, who owned a large and no doubt fragrant plot out towards Gilesgate, between the Farrows Tannery and the House of Correction.
But later in the century, when William Kirsopp decided to build, he chose to move to the Leazes west of Hexham – perhaps he had the prevailing wind in mind? And he hired the top architect of the day, John Dobson, to design his new mansion.
There was a Leazes House before Kirsopp’s time. William Smith Esquire lived there in 1813. But what was good enough for the Smiths wasn’t fit for the Kirsopps. Dobson was called in to work the magic he had already shown at Hexham House, the castles of Bellister, Beaufront and Haughton, and all over the city of Newcastle.
As well as creating the quietly elegant golden stone exterior with every variety of window from oriel to bay to dormer, Dobson also introduced a few comfort features to the remodelled Leazes.
To protect William Kirsopp from the cold north wind, Dobson constructed the main entrance on the south-east corner, with a porch and double doors.
And Dobson was not just an architect for the grand plan. He also attended to the tiny detail – adding innovative vents in the outside walls at ground level to allow air to circulate and prevent dry rot.
The Kirsopp name also belongs to a more obscure Tynedale feature which links the family to later owners of The Leazes – the Strakers.
Kirsopp's Whin is a “fine gorse covert” near Whittington, well known to the fox-hunting fraternity. James Kirsopp of The Leazes hunted through the first half of the 1800s, and John Coppin Straker of The Leazes hunted through the second half.
J.C. Straker became Tynedale’s master of foxhounds. He took his foxhunting very seriously.
One hunt in the 1870s is recorded. “it transpired that Mr Straker, the Tynedale M.F.H., was over thirty miles from the Leazes, Hexham, where he lived. And in those days Mr Straker rode hacks to the meets, and home again at night. I reckoned that day — for they drew again at Darras Hall and had another run — he must have ridden near eighty miles.”
Mr Straker followed the Kirsopps and added to the health benefits available to locals. He gave his support – and £5 cash – to the restoration of the Spa Well at Haydon Bridge.
When the sulphurous spring was re-opened in 1898, Mrs Straker performed the ceremony, bravely drinking the first sip from an engraved silver cup.
The healthy waters of Haydon Bridge were bottled and drunk at the Tynedale Hydropathic Hotel – later called the Hexham Hydro – which opened in 1879 in the former Westfield House, just a field away from The Leazes, and where Charles Dickens and other Victorian Literati 'took the waters'...it features in his novel 'Nicholas Nickleby'.
This clean-living establishment offered Turkish baths, plunge pools and hot seaweed baths as well as mineral-rich spa-waters to drink. At its height a century ago, the Hydro was packed with Christmas revellers despite its lack of a liquor licence.
But then, the area around The Leazes has long been synonymous with health. At the Shaws, just a few yards north of The Leazes, John Charlton died aged 90 in 1833. His mother Eleanor had made it to 99, his aunt Elizabeth to 102, and his uncles John and James Robson lived for 102 and 94 years respectively.
There must be something in the water . . .