Bouth Old Hall Farm

Bouth Old Hall Farm

The current building is 18th-century (NMR), but was the home of Parliamentarian Captain Adam Sandys (the ‘very chaffy light man’) and his wife. Despite this dismissive assessment, in 1662 Sandys left an estate at Cowridding in trust for ‘a preaching schoolmaster ... that is sound in doctrine, in life and conversation,’ who was ‘to teach scholars within Colton and to officiate at the parochial chapel’,¹ and a plaque commemorates him as the benefactor to the church. He also left legacies of 20s each to ‘Mr Camelford’ and ‘Mr Lampitt’. Miles Hallhead once arrived at his house where Lampitt was preaching at a meeting, and Lampitt immediately refused to go on ‘as long as this dumb Devil is in the house‘. The captain took Miles by the hand and led him out of the house, after which presumably the spell on Lampitt was lifted.² He was a great-great-nephew of Archibishop Edwin Sandys, who endowed Hawkshead Grarmmar School. John Sawrey had married his aunt Esther Sandys, and there was a phalanx of Rawlinsons and Richardsons among his relations.

Sandys had a profitable family business making and supplying charcoal — he sold it to Margaret Fell for the tool-making branch of the Force Forge business she managed &mdash which started when his ancester William Sands and an earlier John Sawrey took over the charcoal-making and iron-smelting business from Furness Abbey at the Dissolution.³

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1. From: 'The parish of Colton', A History of the County of Lancaster: Volume 8 (1914), pp. 383-387. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=53339
2. Miles Hallhead A book of some of the sufferings and passages of Myles Halhead of Mount-Joy in Underbarrow in the county of Westmorland as also, concerning his labour and travel in the work of the Lord ... ([London]: A. Sowle, 1690) page 11.
3. Brian G. Awty ‘Force Forge in the Seventeenth Century ’ Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society 77 (1977) 97-112 at 103.