Hackness Spring greens

One from the archives

Hackness is a village and civil parish in the Scarborough district of the county of North Yorkshire, England. It lies within the North York Moors National Park, and is situated at the foot of two moorland valleys, Lowdale and Highdale. The parish population rose from 125 in the 2001 UK census to 221 in the 2011 UK census.

Hackness is mentioned as the site of a double monastery or nunnery by *Bede, writing in the early 8th century. The present Church of Saint Peter is a Grade I listed building, parts of which date from the 11th century.

There have been two monastic foundations at Hackness, first an Anglo-Saxon nunnery founded in 680 and second a cell of Whitby Abbey that was used as a refuge when pirates forced the monks away from the coast.

The original establishment was a nunnery founded by **St. Hild or Hilda of Whitby in 680, the year of her death. According to legend the bells of Hackness tolled at the moment St. Hild died fourteen miles away in Whitby.

Hackness Hall and its landscape gardens were created in the 1790s. The house, a Grade I listed building, was commissioned by Sir Richard Van den Bempde-Johnstone, who had inherited the estate through his mother.

*Bede (672/3 – 26 May 735), also known as Saint Bede, The Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable, was an English monk at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria of the Angles (contemporarily Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey in Tyne and Wear, England).


**Hild (614 - 17 November 680) is a significant figure in the history of English Christianity. As the abbess of Whitby – a monastery for both men and women – she led one of the most important religious centres in the Anglo-Saxon world. In 664 Hild’s monastery hosted the Synod of Whitby, which set the course for the future of Christianity in England.

A lot of history for a small village