About Us

To the visitor, Holystone, is a quiet Northumberland village, an idyll set in the foothills of the Cheviot. It is difficult to imagine that it could be anything else but a haven, somewhere to find peace. If we go back in time to the nineteenth century, life here was somewhat busier. The population varied between 120 and 200 people. The community supported a tailor, butcher and cobbler. There was a doctor and a school with a resident headmistress until the school was closed 40 years ago.

Go back further to the sixteenth century, and Holystone was far from the sleepy hamlet that you see today. Then it was at the heart of the lawless Middle March, part of the disputed Border region made up of the East, Middle and Western Marches. This stretched from the East Coast to that of the West was ruled by the Border Reivers who would offer their services to either the King of Scotland or England, depending on which of them would pay the most; and if they were not fighting for either monarch, then they fought amongst themselves, plundering and rustling as they went. Holystone, without the protection of the "king's peace" which did not extend to the upper reaches of the Coquet, was often the target of raids by border raiders "more fanged than wolves or bears", so wrote the Royal Commissioners in 1541.