Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

[From the sulphur well at Harrogate] we went to St. Mugnus his well at Copgrave, whither a great number of poor people resort to bathe themselves. They put on their shirts wetted in the water, letting them dry upon their backs. This water operates (if at all) by its extraordinary coldness and astringency.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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P.D. Hartley is good:

It can hardly have been by chance that in 1626 Dr Edmund Deane found it necessary, in his Spadacrene Anglia to blast off a broadside against this ‘innefectual superstitious relique of Popery’, for people were coming from far and wide to seek a cure for their ills in the miraculous waters of St Mungo’s Well… An entry in the Copgrove Parish Register gives a rather sad insight into the fact that St Mungo’s holy water was more mystical than medical: ‘A stranger Yt. came to Ye well was buried May 27 1710’

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Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Copgrove (1) W/G ·
• Harrogate (13) W/G ·
• Mineral spa (3) W/G ·
• Poverty (16) W/G ·
• Ray, John (1627-1705) (6), one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists W/G ·
• Saint Mungo (1) W/G ·
• Spa town (4) W/G ·
• Traditional medicine (2) W/G ·

All tags.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

P.D. Hartley is good:

It can hardly have been by chance that in 1626 Dr Edmund Deane found it necessary, in his Spadacrene Anglia to blast off a broadside against this ‘innefectual superstitious relique of Popery’, for people were coming from far and wide to seek a cure for their ills in the miraculous waters of St Mungo’s Well… An entry in the Copgrove Parish Register gives a rather sad insight into the fact that St Mungo’s holy water was more mystical than medical: ‘A stranger Yt. came to Ye well was buried May 27 1710’

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Similar

9 August 1661: John Ray encounters kelp-makers on the coast between Scarborough and Whitby

30 July 1661: John Ray encounters the effigy of a tragic Inuit in his canoe at Hull Trinity House

4 August 1661: The tenant of St Robert’s cave, Knaresborough, tells the parson-naturalist John Ray the legend of the saint and the cripple

5 August 1661: John Ray is told that a knocked-through lighting niche in the Anglo-Saxon crypt under Ripon minster is a chastity test device

29 August 1801: Painter Joseph Farington arrives at Harrogate

7 September 1837: Mary Frances Heaton is gaoled at Doncaster for a breach of the peace and later sent to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum

14 August 1673: A retired coal miner, unable to live from carding wool, decides to go down a pit at Royds Hall (Bradford)

10 March 1665: Blizzards and Dutch attacks prolong Restoration-induced shortages of fodder and coal at Northowram (Halifax)

30 May 1835: Alfred Austin, future poet laureate, “Banjo-Byron that twangs the strum-strum,” is born into rural splendour at Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds

7 February 2018: On Twitter, Terry Robinson of Fleetwood (Lancs) discovers the true origin of Yorkshire tea

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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If Terry was fooled, then so were Fortnum & Mason etc etc:

Fraudster made £550,000 selling fake ‘Scottish-grown tea’

A fraudster who tricked luxury hotels and stores into buying “Scottish-grown tea” that was grown abroad has been found guilty of a £550,000 scam.

Thomas Robinson supplied high-end customers such as Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel and the Dorchester in London with varieties with names like Dalreoch White, Highland Green, Silver Needles and Scottish Antlers Tea.

Trading as The Wee Tea Plantation, he claimed they had been grown on farmland in Perthshire.

Instead, the tea had been imported, repackaged and then resold at hugely-inflated prices, Falkirk Sheriff Court was told.

Robinson also defrauded genuine aspiring Scottish tea growers by selling them plants he claimed were grown in Scotland.

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