We went along to a rather special event in Keld last week celebrating the end of the community effort to develop Keld Resource Centre, with the official opening of its new meeting and exhibition space on the upper floor.
Ernest Whitehead cuts the ribbon outside Keld Resource Centre 28 April 2017
We’ve already made great use of the room for the Every Barn project and can thoroughly recommend it.
The event started off in Keld Chapel and we were fascinated to hear about the chapel’s origins. There’s apparently been a chapel on the site since at least the 1540s, which ended up being wrecked during a riot in the seventeenth century. A poem found years later suggested that this was sparked by a stranger looking for someone to sell him a calf in the chapel:
“There was a man that stood up in the place
Where he had sate, and did proclaim ‘Oyez!
Oyez! I want a calf, if any here
Can give me notice of one, far or near,
I duly will his labour recompense
And will for his trouble give him twopence'”
Extract from papers belonging to Anthony Clarkson of Smithyholme who died in 1857
The chapel was eventually rebuilt in 1789 for the preacher Edward Stillman who up to that point had been preaching in local barns and people’s houses.
It just goes to show the part that cattle and the cowhouses have played for centuries in this part of the world! Read more on the Keld Resource Centre website