Hackness - viewed from Wykeham Forest

Hackness is a village and civil parish in the Scarborough district of the county of North Yorkshire, England. It lies within the North York Moors National Park. The parish population is 221(2011 UK census).

The name Hackness was known as Hacanos, Hacanes, and then Haccanessa/Hagenessa and today as Hackness. It is situated at the foot of two moorland valleys, Lowdale and Highdale.

The first mention of Hackness was during Anglo-Saxon times. Saint Hilda, the abbess of Whitby, founded a nunnery, in the year of her death, 680 AD, at Hackness. The settlement grew and by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was a sizable village. In the Doomsday Book of 1086, the village was spelled Hagenesse and it had 3 churches.

Until the rein of Henry Vlll, the village prospered as a part of the great Whitby Abbey. Geoffrey de Hakenessse became clerk to King Edward ll in the 14th Century, for which he received a pension of four *tuns of wine a year (lucky man). Everything changed in 1539, when King Henry dissolved the monasteries. King Henry appropriated the Hackness Estate for the Crown and sold it off for cash to Sir John Constable.

Hackness Hall (1.7 km from my viewpoint) and its landscape gardens were created in the 1790s. The house, a Grade I listed building, was commissioned by Sir Richard Van den Bempde-Johnstone, who had inherited the estate through his mother. A new entrance was added in 1810. Fire damage in 1910 was restored under the direction of Walter Brierley.

*Normally 252 gallons (1,145 ltrs)