Akeld : Remodelling The Village

The impact of all these changes on the village itself is revealed in the surviving built fabric of the settlement and can be charted in the detailed map evidence, which first becomes available in this period, in the form of a Bell estate map of 1822, the tithe map (1840) and ultimately the Ordnance Survey series, from c. 1860 onwards.  

Akeld Manor, a plain but substantial late 18th-early 19th-century six-bay farmhouse (Grundy 1988, AKE 8; Pevsner 2001, 125), figures on all these maps at the north end of the village and was reportedly built in 1795 by Matthew Culley (Kelly's Directory 1910, 177), conceivably on the site of the medieval manorial centre.

Picture : Akeld Manor

The attendant, large but compact planned complex of farmbuildings to the west was separated from the house by a courtyard with a cottage, carriage house and gateway on the east side of the yard and a range of cartsheds and stables on the west side.  Although these structures (Grundy 1988, AKE 10-12) represent more than one building phase – the cartshed (Grundy 1988, AKE 11) on the west side of the courtyard is older (late 18th century) than the remainder of that range for example – they all appear to fall within the same overall late 18th-early 19th century timeframe for the remodelling of the village and were certainly in existence by the time the settlement is first covered by detailed map evidence.  Indeed the entire complex may substantially represent the work of Matthew Culley, which association considerably enhances the significance of this building assemblage.

Further west still, four ranges of single storey farm cottages were arranged around a square, on the opposite side of the burn (Grundy AKE 14; Pevsner 2001, 125).  These are marked on Fryer's map and the 1822 estate map.  A datestone inscribed 'MC 1795 MC 1895' indicates the cottages were originally erected by Matthew Culley in 1795.  The datestone itself must have been set up in connection with later alterations made by a descendant, the Rev. Matthew T Culley, which are evident on the 2nd edition Ordnance Survey, including the addition of a block of privies in the centre of the courtyard.

The string of cottages between Akeld Manor and the bastle to the south appear for the most part to have been constructed within the same general time frame, though perhaps on the site of earlier dwellings.  Indeed, apart from the bastle, the only building at Akeld which certainly precedes the late 18th-early 19th century remodelling is a mid-18th-century wash house (Grundy 1988, AKE 7) on the south side of Rose Cottage.  On the opposite (west) side of the burn lay two successive watermills built and modified at various stages in the 18th and 19th centuries