They represent a moment in time, when a great mechanical breakthrough changed the nature of British agriculture, sparking riots in some parts of the country.
An old gingang at Neasham Hill, near DarlingtonBut their moment was brief. For 50 years from 1790, every farm needed a horse engine until they, too, were replaced by new, improved technology.
A typical threshing machine from the 1830s, powered by horsesIn 1788, Scottish engineer Andrew Meikle, in Clackmannanshire, patented a threshing machine – a machine that separated the grain from the straw. Previously, this job had been done by hand, by people with a flail thrashing out the grain.
It had been a very labour intensive job – in the 18th Century, a quarter of agricultural labour was devoted to threshing.
Meikle’s mechanical brainwave ended much of that, but for his machine to work in the barn, it needed a source of power. So “horse engines” were built onto the sides of barns.
Often, they were known as “gingangs”, with “gin” being short for “engine” and “gang” being for where the horse got going.
Usually four horses were attached at the shoulders to a large, central, revolving timber, and they were got going – walking – around it in a clockwise direction. They turned the central, vertical pillar which spun a horizontal wheel above it. The wheel had belts attached to it which went through the wall into the barn where they turned the threshing machine which knocked the grain out of the straw, leaving the humans standing idly by marvelling at how much drudgery technology could remove from their lives.
This was such a good idea that within a couple of years of Meikle’s patent being granted, gingang-powered threshing machines were appearing in North Yorkshire and County Durham, the rounded wheelsheds being hurriedly thrown up against existing barns.
A rough gingang, made of cobbles from the nearby River Tees, at a farm at Stapleton, just outside Darlington. This picture was taken by Hugh Mortimer in 2006 but the gingang has since been demolishedThey are distinctive buildings, topped with five or six sided roofs. Their sides are either open or feature wide hatches for ventilation and illumination.
However, they also became the symbol of how new ways were rendering agricultural labourers redundant, and in 1830, the Swing Riots began in Kent and swept across the south and east as labourers violently expressed their dismay at lost jobs and low wages.
The very square gingang at Manor Farm in the middle of Brafferton is a Grade II listed building. Picture: Peter GirouxThe riots were led by a mysterious figure known as “Captain Swing”, his name being a reference to the swinging of the flail that used to do the threshing. He’d write menacing letters to farmers and landowners, demanding higher wages and the abandonment of the machines.
One letter, written to a farmer in Dover in early October 1830 said: “You are advised that if you doant put away your thrashing machine against Munday next you shall have a SWING.” This was a threat that rioters would catch the farmer and swing him on a gallows unless he mended his ways.
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The rioters did attack the farms, smashing the machines and burning the gingangs, but only one person is known to have been killed.
However, as the authorities reasserted their control, 2,000 protestors were arrested, 252 of them were sentenced to death and 481 to transportation to Australia.
The North East was not badly affected by the Swing Riots, perhaps because there were many new jobs opening up in the coalmines and related railway industries that agricultural labourers were able to find alternative employment.
Consequently, in the south, there are very few surviving gingangs because so many were destroyed by the rioters, whereas in the 1970s, it was estimated that there were 800 left in the North East alone.
If the rioters had waited a couple of decades, they would not have needed to attack the gingangs which were about to be made redundant.
By the middle of the 19th Century, the horse engines were overtaken by steam-power. Men like John Fowler – whose monument stands in Darlington’s South Park – went into production building powerful traction engines that could tour the farms and thresh the corn much quicker than a couple of nonchalant nags walking slowly round a wheelshed.
Some gingangs, though, managed to carry on operating until the First World War.
Since then, hundreds have been demolished or left to tumbledown, although quite a few survive: in 2019, Joan and David Hartley published a book, Wheel Sheds of the North York Moors, which contains photographs of nearly 200 gingangs which they had noted on their travels since 1974.
“According to the 1856 Ordnance Survey maps, there were at least 15 farm buildings throughout Aycliffe parish that had a roughly semi-circular building attached,” says John Heslop, of Durham City, who has investigated such matters. “Other semi-circular buildings, such as outside ovens may have existed, but at least some of these were gingangs.
The Grade II listed gingang at Peartree House, Ketton Lane, near Brafferton. Picture: Peter Giroux“One of the few remaining gingangs and threshing barns in the Aycliffe area is near Peartree House in Ketton Lane, Brafferton (to the north of Darlington) although the horse engine has gone and the gingang is now used for the storage of straw bales.”
This is the fate of many surviving gingangs, although their roundish shape doesn’t make them ideal for storage.
A beautiful old gingang spotted by eagle-eyed photographer Peter Giroux near the Baydale Beck Inn to the west of DarlingtonHowever, it is perfect for conversion into a conservatory, which is the current use of those whose threshing barn has been turned into a house.
At least three gingangs in our area have been converted into rural holiday accommodation: there’s The Gingang at Frosterley, and two Wheelhouses, at Barton near Scotch Corner and Swainby near Stapleton.
The ford at Barton in January 1965 with the distinctive rounded shape of the gingang dusted with snow. The barn beside it is still very much an agricultural building – as well as being a threshing barn, it may also once have contained a flour millThe Wheelhouse, beside the beck in Barton, is now a two-bedroom holiday cottage. Picture: Google StreetViewThe best survivors are Grade II listed buildings, such as the one off Ketton Lane or another at Walworth Grange, to the north-west of Darlington, or the one at White Cross Farm, near Piercebridge, which started us off on this mad horse engine hunt (Memories 706).
Many more lie derelict, their moment in time long forgotten when they were the hottest, and most controversial, thing in agriculture.
Like so many of the curiosities featured in Memories, from mileposts to icehouses and beeboles, they were a product of their time. They are a brilliant way of allowing us to travel in time to a very different period when horses were the power of the future and so they should, where possible, be cherished.
Many thanks to everyone who has sent in information and pictures on gingangs. If you’d like to draw our attention to any others, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk – we’d love to hear from you.
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“This gingang is at Two Mile House Farm on Darlington Back Lane on the edge of Stockton,” says Stuart Kidd. “I used to go there with my dad, a local farmer, back in the 1960s when it was still a working farm owned by a chap we used to know as ‘old Elmsly’.” Two Mile House Farm is said to be exactly two miles from the centre of Stockton. It is just down the Back Lane from the delightfully-named Grassy Nook Farm (which doesn’t seem to have a gingang)The threshing machine on the right has been connected to a high-powered traction engine on the left, making the old gingangs obsolete. This picture was taken at Low Waskerley, in north Durham, around 1890