Lady Lumley's Almshouses and the Old Grammar School

At the eastern end of the village, where Chestnut Avenue meets Brook Lane, a long low row of limestone cottages runs back from the road, and a small sandstone building stands at the end of it. They were built together in 1670, paid for by the same woman, and they are still doing what she intended: one of them, at least.

This is the village's oldest working institution and it has been running for over three hundred and fifty years.

Elizabeth Lumley

Born Elizabeth Cornwallis, daughter of Sir William Cornwallis and his first wife Lucy. She married twice: Sir William Sandys in 1596, and in 1630 Richard, 1st Viscount Lumley of Waterford, whose family seat was Lumley Castle in County Durham. She had no children.

Her connection to this part of Yorkshire came through her mother, who was raised at Snape and Sinnington and left her estates there. Elizabeth inherited Sinnington and retired to it.

She executed the trust deed that founded the almshouses and the school in 1657, and died on 2 February 1658, twelve years before either building was finished. She is buried in Westminster Abbey, in the vault of the Earl of Exeter in the Chapel of St John the Baptist. Her memorial stone reads simply: Elizabeth (Cornwallis), 2nd wife of Richard, 1st Viscount Lumley, 1658.

Westminster Abbey's own record describes her as a great benefactress who founded almshouses and schools in north Yorkshire and in London. Her bequests also founded the school at Pickering that still carries her name.

The almshouses

Historic England list entry 1074192, Grade II, listed 10 November 1953. The listing reads:

Row of 12 almshouses. 1670; restored C19; modernised and extended C20. Founded under the terms of a Trust Deed executed by Lady Elizabeth Lumley in 1657. Squared limestone with stone flag roof. Single-cell, lobby-entry plan, with C20 rear extensions. Single storey, 24-bay front. Paired 4-panel doors in plain square surrounds alternate to the left and right of 2-light diamond lattice windows with cinquefoil heads in similar surrounds. C19 tablet to centre recording the origins of The Charity. Moulded eaves cornice. Seven ridge stacks.

What to look for

• Twenty-four bays for twelve dwellings, a door and a window each. That is why the doors are described as paired and alternating: they come two together, then two windows, then two doors again.
• Cinquefoil heads on the windows, each light topped with five small arched lobes, a Gothic motif already two centuries old when this was built.
• Seven chimney stacks along the ridge, and a moulded eaves cornice running the length of the row.
• A tablet at the centre recording the origins of the charity. It is nineteenth-century, not original, and Historic England does not transcribe it. There is also a modern interpretive board nearby. The two are different things, and what is printed online as "the inscription" is the board, not the tablet.

The almshouses are limestone. The school at the end of the row is sandstone. Same benefactor, same year, different stone.

Still twelve, still working

Twelve dwellings in 1670 and twelve today, now one-bedroom bungalows at 1 to 12 Chestnut Avenue, modernised behind the original front.

The charity is Lady Lumley's Almshouses, registered charity 229068, with eight unpaid trustees and its registered office at the Old Grammar School next door. For the year to 31 March 2025 it reported income of £92,959 and expenditure of £68,070. It is a member of the Almshouse Association.

Who can live there. The published criteria are that applicants must be over 60, must have lived in the surrounding parishes for five years, and must be able to demonstrate limited finances. Vacancies are advertised through the parish council.

The original allocation was fixed by parish quota, and it is worth setting down because it shows where Elizabeth Lumley's obligations lay: six places from Sinnington, four from Thornton, one from Farmanby or Ellerburn, and one alternating between Marton and Little Edston. Sinnington, where she lived, took half.

The renovations. A £1 million modernisation completed in October 2014, with insulation, double glazing, underfloor heating, new kitchens and bathrooms with wet-room showers, was carried out with the housing association Broadacres and the developer Southdale, part-funded by a loan from Charity Bank. The Earl and Countess of Scarborough unveiled a commemorative plaque at the opening on 2 December 2014; the founder was an ancestor of theirs. A further fundraising appeal ran in 2025 (Gazette & Herald, Karen Darley, 27 June 2025).

These are people's homes. The row is visible from Chestnut Avenue and it is well worth a look, but the people behind those twelve doors live there. Look and photograph from the road, keep off the paths and gardens, and keep residents out of your pictures.

The Old Grammar School

Historic England list entry 1361319, Grade II, listed 10 November 1953, the same day as the almshouses. Founded under the same 1657 trust deed, completed in the same year.

It stands gable-end on to the street, and the feature to look for is high up: a recessed bell-opening in the gable above a three-light round-headed Perpendicular window, under a hood-mould. The entrance is not on the street gable but on the right return, on Brook Lane. Coursed sandstone rubble on a chamfered plinth, with ashlar quoins and dressings and a graduated stone flag roof.

The school was open to children from the endowed parishes who could read the New Testament. It had a schoolroom said to seat 200. In 1864 it had twenty-six pupils, all boys; by 1890 it had sixteen.

It closed in 1904–05 and was amalgamated with its sister foundation on the Pickering site, which continues today as Lady Lumley's School.

What it is now, and what it is not. Historic England describes it as "Grammar School, now meeting hall". It is a small meeting hall: the village bridge club meets there on Monday evenings, and it hosts occasional events. It is the registered office of the almshouse charity. It is not Thornton-le-Dale Village Hall, which is a different building on Pickering Road, about 280 metres away. See which hall is which.

Thornton Bridge, fifty metres on

Historic England list entry 1064787, Grade II, listed 5 February 1986. Early to mid eighteenth century, widened and partly rebuilt in the mid nineteenth.

Thornton Bridge does not look the same from both banks, and once you know why, you cannot unsee it. A widening leaves the two faces belonging to different centuries.

From the upstream side you see the older work: two flattened, elliptical arches, their voussoirs (the wedge-shaped stones of the arch ring) chamfered and set alternately long and short for effect, divided by a stubby buttress pier. To the right is a third, semicircular arch, rebuilt, carrying the beck's diverted millstream rather than the main channel.

Walk to the downstream parapet and the arches read as semicircular, their voussoirs rusticated, deliberately roughened. A Victorian face on a Georgian bridge.

Both parapets are plain, with cambered coping and cylindrical domed piers at each of the four corners.

All three in five minutes

The almshouses, the Old Grammar School and Thornton Bridge stand within about eighty metres of each other at the eastern end of the village. The school adjoins the end of the almshouse row; the bridge is roughly fifty metres further east, carrying the A170 over the beck.

Parking is on Chestnut Avenue or Brook Lane, but these are residential streets, and the surer option is the main pay-and-display car park on Maltongate, then a short walk; see the parking guide.