The New Murrey and Blue blog

Well, Blagraves in Barnard Castle has been for sale for some time and has cropped up a number of time before in this blog, usually because it was once owned by Richard III. An excellent selling-point, in my opinion. But—heaven forfend—perhaps not excellent enough? Because it is now being touted as Oliver Cromwell’s Cottage.

Eh? Did old Ollie once reside in Barnard Castle? Did he maybe toast its illustrious former owner? Well no, not quite. In its history, Blagraves wasn’t only a residence, it was also an inn and more recently a restaurant. However, its new claim to fame is that when it was an inn none other than Oliver Cromwell dropped off there one day. And night, it seems, for he enjoyed too much of the local mead and became somewhere sloshed. That’s how the story goes, anyway. So maybe he did let his hair down occasionally.

Even so, it’s stretching things a bit to call the property his cottage, as if he liked to lean on the garden gate, smoking a pipe while encouraging the bees to make more and more honey for the mead. He’d probably have fainted if he’d known it would one day be on the market for £485,000!

“….The second oldest building in the town, Blagraves is a Grade I-listed four-bedroom home with a commercial space on its ground floor that used to serve as an antiques shop, café and gallery. The riverside cottage right by the Tees comes complete with a charming courtyard garden, a spacious cellar that used to be a brewery and have a well, and minstrel figures which were added in the 20th century to the building’s front….” [See https://tinyurl.com/yemmwjhn for a lot more information about Blagraves.]

PS: Since writing this I have received some interesting information from my friend, João Rozo, who used to be a tenant landlord at the Blagrave Arms in Barnard Castle and The Bugle in Reading. He writes as follows: “….There’s a ‘probable link’ with Oliver Cromwell to Blagrave. The Blagrave who signed the death warrant for Charles I was Daniel Blagrave, who with the other 59 signatories condemned King Charles I to death & become a very wealthy man as a consequence! A prominent resident of the town of Reading, Berkshire, he was Member of Parliament for the Parliamentary Borough of Reading over several periods between 1640 and 1660 On the restoration of King Charles II, Daniel Blagrave fled the country and settled at Aachen, in what is now Germany, where he died in 1668 at age 65. There’s a Street & a Public House named after him in Reading town centre, just a stone’s throw from the rail station….” Thank you, João!

by viscountessw