Ingram : Potential For Further Research

The village of Ingram is situated amidst a landscape, which, in addition to its outstanding natural beauty, represents an archaeological palimpsest of staggering quality and preservation. Unfortunately the traces of the village’s own past history have survived rather less well.

The village had already shrunk from its full medieval extent by the time it is depicted on the earliest detailed map, a plan of Ingram estate dating to c. 1820. Thus the layout of the medieval village cannot be reconstructed with certainty though its general location can be estimated. The most obvious surviving component is the Church of St Michael

The precise location of the ‘little tower’ mentioned in Bowes and Ellerker’s Border survey in 1541 is uncertain, but since it was the residence of the vicar in 1541 it probably lay close to the church, perhaps on or near the site of the current rectory. Since it was reportedly being threatened with being washed away by the Breamish, along with the rest of the ‘town’, it must have lain relatively close to the river.

The corn mill lay downstream of the main settlement on a site still occupied today.

There is slender but convincing charter evidence that the Breamish Valley formed part of a large estate belonging to St Cuthbert’s monastery of Lindisfarne.

Ingram is one of the sites which has been proposed as a candidate to be the centre of this ‘multiple estate’ or ‘shire’, though Greaves Ash and Ingram Hill have also been proposed. No conclusive evidence has yet been recovered to support any of these candidates, though Ingram is probably as convincing as either of the other two. No evidence for early medieval activity was found during the recent excavations in St Michael’s churchyard.