Low Buston. By J. C. Hodgson. 523 



trade as a corn factor in Alnmouth, and had purchased property 

 there,at North Sunderland, and at Longhoughton. In 181 7, partly 

 by bequest and partly by purchase, he acquired lands at 

 Tritlington, purchased in 1784 by his maternal uncle Thomas 

 Potts, when the Threlkeld property there was sold. In 1817, 

 he married his kinswoman Ann, second daughter of Richard 

 Hodgson of Cowpen and Bedlington. In 1829, in recognition of 

 the fact of his fortune having been made in Alnmouth, he built 

 a school-house, which, with 7 cottages as an endowment, he 

 vested in trustees by a deed enrolled in Chancery in 1830, for 

 educating poor children in Alnmouth, and for the use as a 

 meeting-house "for the people called Methodists." In 1838 he 

 purchased Wilkinson's lands at Low Buston which lay much inter- 

 mixed with his own, and died the same year, aged 70, leaving his 

 Low Buston property to his widow, who enjoyed it until her 

 death in 1879, at the age of 88, when it passed to her sister, the 

 present owner, Miss Catherine Hodgson. 



In the field in which the old village stood, were three or four 

 roods of land unenclosed, which did not belong to the main 

 estate. From a plan of 1779, the tenement evidently consisted 

 of a house facing the village street, and a garden sloping down 

 to the brook: how it escaped the settlement of 1762, unless 

 purchased subsequently, cannot now be unravelled, but in 1807 

 it passed under the will of C. F. Forster, and was inherited 

 ultimately by his great nephew the present Major Thompson of 

 Walworth, from whom it was in 1867 purchased by Mrs. Appleby. 



Apart from the beauty of its sheltered situation (which gives 

 it its name of Buston Yale) there is nothing very notewoithy 

 about the mansion. The oldest portion probably built by the 

 Forsters on acquiring the property with thick walls and low 

 rooms, was pulled down and rebuilt by Mr Appleby about 1820, 

 the oldest portion left can scarcely have been built before 1700. 

 A still later portion — perhaps erected about 1780— contains a 

 somewhat fine stair-case of timber, said to have been constructed 

 by a skilled carpenter of the junior branch of the Buston family. 1 



We shall have to fall back to 1818 to pick up the other 

 Forster moiety. The purchaser, Nicholas Appleby, as has been 

 shown in a former paper, was already owner of Sturton Grange, 

 Eastfield, and Earsdon Hill. He died in 1828, unmarried, 



1 In 1777 Thomas Buston, joiner, Buston, voted as freeman of New- 

 castle. — Neircaxtle Poll Hook, 



