Plum Famous
Yealand Storrs, writes the eighteenth century historian John Lucas, is famous for its “excellent plumbs”.
It seems like a faint claim to fame.
Storrs is the smallest of the three Yealands — a Yealand reprise in the south-to-north sequence of settlements: Yealand Conyers, Yealand Redmayne and Yealand Storrs. If Conyers boasts the pub and church and Redmayne has the village school, what — other than plums — does Storrs bring to the party? Well, in Yealand Old Hall it has a fine, grand 17th century farmhouse, which until the 1990’s was home to the well-liked and eccentric lawyer Sir Sanderson (‘Sandy)’ Temple, QC.
Sir Sandy — who died in 1999 — was an advocate at the now permanently adjourned Appleby Assizes which used to sit in Westmorland’s ancient County town. He later became a circuit judge and Recorder of Liverpool. A local newspaper reporter who asked what “Recorder” meant, was advised to look in a dictionary, with Sir Sandy adding helpfully: “It is between rape and robbery and is defined as an old English wind instrument.” Sir Sandy enlivened his retirement and the local highways by driving around in a coach pulled by a zonkey — a half zebra half donkey.
Yealand Storrs is thought by some to have once been the site of a much larger medieval village. Tell-tale lumps and bumps pepper the hill-side overlooking Leighton Moss RSPB reserve. There’s been no archaeological dig to test the theory that these might be the remains of long deserted homesteads abandoned — perhaps — when the Black Death halved the population of Lancashire in the Middle Ages. Below that same hill, however, among the played-out peat dales on Storrs Moss, archaeologists did uncover evidence of much earlier habitation. In the 1960’s a team from Liverpool University discovered worked timbers and tiny stone blades which showed that hunter gatherers had lived on the margins of a tidal inlet. Wildfowl and their eggs, deer, fish and wild plants like fat-hen and iris would have sustained the Mesolithic settlers more than 6,000 years ago…long before the 18th century “plumbs” arrived on the scene.
Today proximity to Leighton Moss itself is a source of fame. The wetland reserve attracts well over 100,000 visitors each year and has been featured on natural history television programmes like Autumnwatch and Countryfile.
It should also be said that 300 years after John Lucas’s observation, plums of undeniable excellence are still to be found in the hamlet. Storrs stalwarts David and Jan Wrigley had a fine crop of juicy Victoria plums on a tree in their garden a month or so ago. David was happy to be photographed for this piece and he sportingly agreed to read out loud the full Lucas quote about Storrs and its famous plumbs.
