What drew me to Mark Sanderson’s story was a question we’ve all asked when passing a derelict dwelling. What happened there? Who lived there? The house has been empty for years now, paint lifting from the window frames, render exposing the stonework.

Mark Sanderson was born on Christmas Day, 1835. The 1841 census finds him at six years old on Challoner Street in Cockermouth, a town of around four thousand seven hundred people back then. Mark’s father, Richard, died there in 1849 – a stomach stricture – when Mark was thirteen. The same census that places one of his brothers in work records his widowed mother, Dinah, as a pauper. Pauper meant more than hardship. Since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, only those officially classed as destitute could qualify for relief. It wasn’t enough to be poor. You had to prove dependence. Relief for widows with young children came as a small weekly payment – two or three shillings – or in kind: coal, bread, secondhand clothing for the children. The Board of Guardians in Cockermouth recorded every item in its minute books, measured and approved.

Walk up Kirkgate from Challoner Street and you reach All Saints, where Richard and Dinah had Mark christened in January 1836. Georgian terraces from the 1720s line the cobbled street, protected as listed buildings, trees shading the way. Fire had destroyed much of the church in 1850, leaving only the medieval tower standing. When the vestry met on Thursday June 12, 1851, ratepayers were asked to fund its rebuilding. Mr Tyson spoke. He said they all regretted the destruction of their church, and that if they didn’t rebuild it soon, the Consistory Court would compel them. Even in ruins, the established church could still exercise its legal teeth – from Methodists and Quakers alike. Mark was not alone in turning towards dissent.

Cockermouth in Mark’s boyhood sat below a castle already ancient, its ruins rising above the town. The castle had come to the Wyndham family through the Percy inheritance. George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, welcomed J.M.W. Turner into his home at Petworth House. He funded canals and agricultural experiments. He also organised the systematic removal of surplus rural workers to Canada. The Petworth Emigration Scheme shipped thousands to Upper Canada during these years. Not by changing conditions at home, but by moving the poor elsewhere.

Public houses on every corner served the men who came to the Main Street hiring fairs, trading their labour. Three years before Mark’s birth, Williamson Peile – a colliery owner who would later lease mining rights in Gilcrux – soared in a balloon above the town, writing of the “white vapour rising into still air.” From below, the world looked very different.

In 1855, at around nineteen years old, Mark took up an apprenticeship as a smith with the Maryport and Carlisle Railway. He needed documentation. William Irvine, a draper who had known Mark all his life, made a formal declaration of his age.

Sanderson, M. (b. 1835). Proof of age document, 1855. Testified by William Irvine, Cockermouth. Reference 46574. British Civil Service Evidence of Age. Society of Genealogists. Available at: https://findmypast.co.uk [paid subscription.] Date accessed: Sunday November 09, 2025.

The locomotive superintendent was a Scot named George Tosh, a pioneer who had been in post since 1854, already transforming how the company built and maintained its rolling stock. His chairman would later describe him as “a most valuable servant of the company, who worked day and night and kept his department in excellent order.”

I try to imagine how the works announced themselves to Mark each morning. Iron and noise where there had been quiet in the fields. The ring of hammers on metal carrying across Maryport at dawn. The heat. Smiths shaped brake systems and boiler parts over forges that burned coal now, not coke. Another of Tosh’s innovations. The air grew thick with a different quality of smoke.

Mark boarded in Maryport with Mrs Jane Quay, widow of William, a seaman who had died some years earlier. Her house was full: another lodger, her daughters, a two-year-old grandson, her daughter Eleanor’s grocer husband. Whatever stillness had followed William Quay’s death had long since filled with voices and footsteps.

Mark returned each evening. Soot in his hair. Hands blackened. Clothes smelling of the forge. He was earning seventeen shillings a week – more than rural labour could offer. I know that from his obituary. No longer a farm labourer at the hiring fair, but a craftsman with a trade beginning to belong to him. And yet, I think Mark must have known, early on, that this was not the life he wanted. It wasn’t the hard work he minded. I believe he had his father’s animal husbandry in his genes. He missed the open countryside. He missed everything about horses. He began to dream, and to save.

One of Mrs Quay’s daughters, Ann Mason, lived in service. It was Ann he would marry.

On the night of April 7th, 1861, Mark was still at Mrs Quay’s. The census records him there. Ten weeks later, on Sunday June 23, he and Ann wed at Crosscanonby Church, three miles along the coast road from Maryport, the Solway Firth on your left. I often try to picture their day when I’m on that road. June weather in West Cumbria is rarely settled. Sun one moment, cloud the next. Light shifting across the estuary, water sometimes silver, sometimes gold.

Crosscanonby lies inland, about three-quarters of a mile from the road, set back into a wedge of ground between fields. When Mark and Ann stood in that church, they entered a building layered with centuries. The present structure dates from 1130, with a south aisle added in the thirteenth century. The chancel arch is Roman, brought from Maryport fort – possibly from the commandant’s entrance. Light enters through Norman windows dating to around 1120. Outside against the south wall, a Norse hogback gravestone from the ninth or tenth century, its ridge carved like a shingled roof. The name Crosscanonby derives from Old Norse, ‘krossa býr’, meaning ‘village marked by crosses’. On that June day in 1861, Mark and Ann added their names to the long record. Joining their lives in a space shaped and shared by many cultures.

By the time of the 1871 census, Mark and Ann were at Row Moor in Dearham, farming fifteen acres. John was born in early 1863, Isabel in April 1865, Mark in the winter of 1867, and James in early 1870.

But 1870 brought tragedy to another family whose story was weaving towards Mark’s. On Wednesday November 30, falling stone killed Jane Watson’s husband Richard at Crosby Colliery. At thirty-six, Jane found herself widowed with five children – a twelve-year-old daughter and four sons, the youngest barely a year old. Three of their five children would eventually become ministers, as if the family had collectively decided that faith offered the only reliable foundation.

Then, on Tuesday December 17, 1878, at the age of fifteen, Mark’s son John died.
“Typhoid Fever 36 days. Congestion of both lungs, 30 days…. Mark Sanderson, Father, Present at the Death. Row Moor, Dearham.”

By 1881, Mark and his family had taken on the tenancy of Grange Farm, under the estate of Sir Wilfrid Lawson of Brayton Hall, Aspatria. Grange Farm sits at the end of a long private drive in the far east end of our parish. The name remains even now and the name Grange Farm has always held something for me. A grange wasn’t just a farm. It was church land – a satellite in an English abbey’s system. By the end of the twelfth century, two Cistercian abbeys held interests here in the village: Holm Cultram, founded in 1150 with Scottish royal backing, and Calder Abbey.

In the 1240s, William d’Orm d’Ireby gave Holm Cultram his house in the village with its gardens and orchards and, later, eleven acres of arable land. Lay brothers worked the land and the yield went back to the abbey. Wool, mostly. The Cistercian monks were farmers before they were anything else.

Lawson’s many speeches, and the social makeup of his electorate, suggest he favoured granting tenancies to nonconformists – to Methodists like Mark, whom he saw as the moral core of the countryside.

It was here, at Grange Farm, that the fire came.

Sunday January 2, 1887. James had walked to chapel. It was his turn to get everything ready for divine service at six o’clock. Mark junior had taken the horse and trap, to visit his sweetheart, perhaps. Mark was on the high ground at Moota, checking sheep. In Grange farmhouse, Ann sat sewing in the eastern room, Isabel beside her. Fire lit. The day already closing in. Lamplight. Cloth in the hand. Needle passing back and forth. The tick of a clock. The smell of beeswax. And something else. First, the faintest change in the air. A stitch missed. A pause. Then the rise of it – a thick, wrong smell. Not the hearth. Not the stove. Something else. They were on their feet before they named it.

Mark saw the smoke from the hill. A single column lifting into the gloaming. By the time he reached the yard, the fire had taken what it came for. The Workington Free Press and Solway Pilot reported it on Saturday January 08, 1887, through a correspondent who signed himself Bruno:

“I am very sorry for Mr Mark Sanderson of the Grange Farm, Gilcrux. On Sunday night last he lost a deal of his stock, including two horses, two dogs, and a bull, by a disastrous and mysterious fire, that is believed to have been caused wilfully by someone. Mark Sanderson is a very worthy man, and he has had to work hard and long for what he is possessed of… Old Dinah Sanderson’s yeast was a well-known article in and around Cockermouth in my boyhood, and Tom Sanderson, Mark’s brother, was as well known as the town clock.”

Two weeks later, Jonathan Simpson of Crosby Villa, Maryport wrote to correct the record.

“He says that ‘the mysterious fire is believed to have been caused wilfully by some one.’ This ‘belief’ was never promulgated by Mr Sanderson… His real loss in stock was three horses, five milch cows, a bull and two dogs… He is, as ‘Bruno’ says, a ‘worthy man,’ who unfortunately has seen the hard earnings and a whole life’s thrift and economy swept away in a single night.”

I have driven down to Grange Farm twice. Nothing in the yard says what happened there. No plaque. No scars. Just an ordinary working farm with a handsome Georgian house. I wanted to hold silence in that yard for the animals that died.

By 1891, they had moved to The Retreat. The farm directly across the road from my cottage. The derelict house in the aurora photograph.
I still wonder why. A second holding, after the fire at Grange? An ambition to grow what was already stretched? Whatever the reason, their time here was short.

Saturday May 14, 1892. Mark’s oldest son is rolling a field with the iron drum. Jane Watson’s grandson, Richard, eight years old, is running alongside. Quick, full of questions. A pause to check the harness. Then the boy was down. A sound like nothing. A cry. Caught – leg wedged between the drum and the frame. It was bad. From ankle to knee. Bone crushed. Dr Briggs came. He took the leg at the knee, packed carbolic gauze into the wound, and the village held its breath. Richard lived.

On Wednesday August 08, 1894, Mark and Ann’s daughter Isabel married the Reverend Richard William Simpson Watson at the Methodist chapel in the village. It was the first marriage ever solemnised there. A large concourse of friends turned in to witness the ceremony. The bride was given away by her father. On leaving the chapel the party were well scattered with rice. Refreshments followed – at Grange Farm, according to one newspaper, at Retreat Farm, according to another. It’s becoming clearer that Mark farmed both properties at the same time, for a while. The Reverend Richard William Simpson Watson was young Richard’s uncle. The boy who had lost his leg in Mark’s field two years earlier.

By Saturday October 19, 1895, the Maryport Advertiser reported it plainly.

“The farm at Gilcrux occupied by Mr Sanderson and Sons has been let to Mr Robert Porteous, Allerby. Candlemas Entry.”

Candlemas. February 2. One of the great hinges of the agricultural calendar. A time to settle accounts, renew tenancies, take stock. It arrived forty days after Christmas, when the light was just beginning to stretch into the evenings. Ewes lambing. Snowdrops shouldering through iron-hard soil.

For Mark, Candlemas 1896 meant Crosby. A new farm. A new landlord: Richard Bowman Brockbank, a Quaker who kept Clydesdales. Mark – a Methodist – had spent his years at Grange under Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the Liberal baronet and champion of temperance. This next move wasn’t only geographic. Quaker or Methodist, the agreement likely rested on the same ground: hard work, sobriety, diligence. The moral economy of the nonconformist countryside.

I found a memoir of Brockbank, printed for private circulation in 1912, in an online bookshop. Brockbank read quietly before breakfast, believed in self-denial, astronomy, and the moral power of fresh air. Both men had deep roots in West Cumberland. It’s easy to imagine how he would have looked favourably on Mark.

To take up a farm at Candlemas was to enter it at its hardest point. The land at its leanest. Nothing sown. Nothing to harvest. Only mud. Cold. And possibility.

At the end of February, a boon ploughing was arranged at Mark’s farm.
Boon. A word with soil under its nails. Its roots are Norse. Bón meant a plea, a petition, a kind of prayer. Over time, the prayer became the thing being asked for. A favour. A small mercy. Later, under the manorial system, a boon day meant labour owed to the local lord. Ploughing, or whatever the land demanded. It wasn’t optional, but the word still carried a shadow of choice. Forty-one draught teams turned up. Horses ribboned, ploughs gleaming. Messrs Metcalfe, Clark, Whitehead and John Watson helped Mark see to the logistics. Mr Blamire carved the dinner. A group of local women saw to the tables, their names all recorded. And Mark himself stood up to thank the men for the work they’d done.

Sunday June 07, 1896. The Primitive Methodist Sunday school held its anniversary at the chapel in Crosby. A public tea followed. Then the children were invited to continue their celebrations in one of the Sandersons’ fields. The field wasn’t lent for gain. It was offered. A family busy with spring work, and carrying the weight of illness, gave the children space to run, to make noise, to mark the day. Ann Sanderson, meanwhile, had been ill for some time.

On Thursday August 27, 1896, a boiler exploded on the farm. A steam threshing machine had been brought in. One of Mark’s sons was up early to light the fire. Water in the glass. The engine brought up to ten pounds of steam. Threshing began – and the boiler exploded. The force of it lifted the boiler clear over the house, into the village. No one was hurt. The newspaper makes a point of noting that Mark was not at home at the time.

Ann Mason Sanderson died at Crosby on Friday September 18, 1896. She was sixty-seven. The cause: chronic phthisis – tuberculosis of the lungs – and exhaustion. Her sister, Mary Quay, was present at the end, and registered the death the following day. Mary’s address was Mason’s Yard, Crosby Street, Maryport. I wonder if that yard, that place, is where Ann’s middle name came from? Twelve years earlier, Ann had nursed Ellen, their seventeen-year-old niece, daughter of Mark’s sister Mary, who died from the same disease at Grange Farm. It’s possible Ann contracted the infection in 1884 and carried it silently for over a decade, the active disease emerging in her sixties when her immune system became more vulnerable. Her funeral notice was brief.

“Friends please accept this (the only) intimation.”

A cortège set off after the day’s work was done. Left the farm at three. Crosscanonby churchyard the destination – the same church where Mark and Ann had married, thirty-five years before.

I went to Crosscanonby in May 2023 with my friend Mark Leckenby, intending to find Ann. The oldest part of the churchyard was beautifully wild, thick with cow parsley. Many stones lean. Others have lost their inscriptions altogether. Mark and I walked the ground twice, took different routes. Here and there I crouched to check where a stone had sunk, traced shallow carving with my fingertips, unsure of letters. Either Ann’s stone has worn too smooth to read. Or it’s gone entirely. A grave unmarked now. Weather erases them before we do.

On Thursday October 14, 1897, Mark’s eldest son, also Mark, married Catherine (Katie) Messenger at the Wesleyan Chapel in Flimby. Mark junior had found his voice by then – chairing a meeting of the Local Peace Union in Maryport, presided over by their landlord, Brockbank. The resolution, to support proposals to limit armament production among the nations, was carried unanimously. It was Mark junior who proposed it.

That same autumn of 1896, a brief notice had appeared in the Suffolk Chronicle. The Rev. Sir Charles Clarke, Bart., had let his farm at Ellough Hall in Beccles, Suffolk, and was in the process of selling his horses, cattle, sheep, and farming implements. The name meant nothing to Mark then. Just another place, far off in the flat country of the east. But the land was changing hands. And one day, though he didn’t know it yet, Mark would take it on.

To be continued.