Ours was called The Black Horse Inn and it had been a coaching inn for many, many years. We investigated its history at our local county records office and found references back to a lady publican in 1732.
There were other cottages on our site surrounding the inn and the horse drawn coaches used to stop here on their journey from the Midland towns of Leicester and beyond to Norwich and the sea at Great Yarmouth.
Norwich, at one time, was the second largest city in England after London and was the home of a large lace and crepe industry as well as shoe manufacture, weaving and, of course, through the Quakers, banking. Barclays Bank started in Norwich with the Gurney family.
So the road was well travelled and the journey would have taken many days. The Black Horse Inn was a staging post with extensive stables for the horses that pulled the coaches.
In recent years, many celebrities of the theatre have stayed in these walls including stars of the vaudeville theatre, one lady, Marie Lloyd, used to stay here to get away from the public eye whilst she was "drying out" from drink problems, we are told. In latter years Bill Maynard, a comedy actor, always stayed here whilst he was appearing at the Theatre Royal in Norwich.
The village was bypassed by the main road in the late 1970's and trade at the inn disappeared. Sales of beer dropped and by 1982 the owners decided to put it on the market. We bought it and started to renovate it, a task that continues to this day.
In 1983, at a school jumble sale, Ann and I were running a stall called a "White Elephant" stall. This is a stall that sells all sorts of things that parents donated, from new kitchen utensils to a tea dispenser that was bought every year but always appeared the following year to be sold again. That item must have made at least £100.00 for school funds over the years! As the sale drew to an end, we would mark items down to as low as 1p and the children would descend on the stall for bargains!
On the stall, this particular year, was an ornament, a pewter figure of a man, working on a wooden cart wheel. For some reason both Ann and I fell in love with the figure and we purchased it for the princely sum of £1.00.
Ever since then it has graced our ornament display and has been much loved. Alright, its not worth anything but it fits in well and we like pewter. We also have a modern figure of a miner pushing a coal cart in the mine, which reminds me of my maternal roots in mining. But somehow the little figure of a man working on his wheel is our favorite.
Imagine our surprise when, walking into a shop in Franeker a few months ago, we saw a similar figure, with a wheel. This one is moving the wheel, perhaps out of the workshop. We just had to have it!
It came home with us and now we have a carriage wheel manufacturing unit on our display cabinet. Not worth a lot but they give us great pleasure.
Recently a book has been published about Scarning village and it includes a number of references to our house. These include items on the bare knuckle fight bouts that were held in the stables, now long gone and the businesses that were run in the yard that is now our garden. There were a number of houses also here and a blacksmiths shop just across the road.
But the spooky bit is that, the main business in our yard, as well as the inn was:
A WHEELWRIGHTS SHOP!!!
And we had no idea at all that it had been here until we read the book.