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The Birtwhistles of Craven and Galloway
Although Anna wrote from Reading in 1842 that …we have fortunately no log of law round our necks except the yet unsettled ceremony of dividing, which concerns the B’hive more than us, it was not until 1847 that a deed was registered at Wakefield defining the share of the settlement which had fallen to Agnes and her daughter Anna. Surprisingly, their share of the property division was similar in size to that revealed in the papers submitted to the first Birtwhistle vs Vardill hearing. There were some 1800 acres of land in Long Preston, Kirkby Malham, Nappa and Carleton, and a large number of properties in Caroline Square, Skipton. No doubt other deeds, which have yet to come to light, will detail the shares of the other members of the B’hive.
Figure 31 Caroline Square, at the southern end of Skipton High Street, as Anna Vardill will have known it. Note the market cross, which features in Lady Anne of Pembroke in 1819 (just to the right of the centre in the middle distance), which no longer survives
Marriage and a return to Galloway (1822-1830) Bonds to the value of £8000 were placed in trust for Anna by her mother on 3^rd May 1822 and, on 19^th May, she married James Niven, a Kirkcudbright lawyer who had handled her uncle William’s business. A letter to her friends in London on 12 July revealed that the newly weds were living at Balmae, the former mansion of her uncle, and a strange comment in the letter suggests that Anna was aware that her former tutor in Gatehouse, Monsieur Cramozin of Rouen, had been one of her father’s “agents”. In describing to her friends a visit to the headland overlooking the Dee estuary, Anna commented that her late uncle had once joked that he had mistaken a Frenchman’s plan for a modern
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