North East Statues

A strange addendum to this post about Acklam Hall that I’ve been sitting on for about a decade. One for the cryptozoologists amongst you.

When I was doing my History MA, I spent a lot of time researching Acklam Hall – a Restoration Era country pile and Middlesbrough’s only Grade 1 listed building. This is mainly because I went to college there when it had some 1970s boxes grafted to its side.

While searching through some digital archives, I found the absolute cracker of a story displayed at the top of the page. A Christmas Day article from the Newcastle Courant (now-defunct local broadsheet) noting the death of a strange and curious creature on the Acklam Hall estate.

“There was lately killed on the estate of T. Hustler, Esq., of Acklam Hall, in Cleveland, an animal, whose head resembled that of a fox, its body bore the resemblance of the cat, being somewhat shorter and stronger in its legs, and its tail was similar to the otter. It was of a dark grey colour and measured from its nose to the tip of the tail 2 feet 10 inches.”

The Newcastle Courant, Friday, December 25, 1840.

Clearly, The Courant was a forebear of the Daily Sport in its choice of news story. Printed in a time when Darwin was in the midst of researching his evolutionary theories, perhaps he could have saved himself the trip to the Galapagos Islands and nipped up north instead to see true miracles of nature.

The common consensus when I first posted this is that the Beast of Acklam was no more than a pine marten, which were then still extant in the UK (and are being reintroduced to parts of the country today). My only question with that is why neither hunter nor journalist knew what a pine marten was. Maybe somebody had been slacking on their zoology studies, or perhaps those beautiful creatures were already rare in the area by the 1840s.

In a region where mythical creatures are thin on the ground (Peg Powler being the only other one in Teesside I’ve heard of – although feel free to set me straight on that), perhaps we have room in our hearts for one more wee cryptid.

Some folks say that if you sit quietly by the dark pond at Acklam Hall at midnight on Christmas Eve, you’ll hear the bone-chilling call of the beast in its final moments.

In the meantime, here’s a song I wrote about the piece with my old band By Toutatis.