In 1789 Robert Raikes married the daughter and heiress of Thomas Williamson of Welton House, in the village of Welton, near Hull. Early in the 19th century Robert and Elizabeth Raikes moved to Welton House, and the property passed to them on the death of Williamson in 1809. In 1818 Raikes built an elegant classical rotunda in a romantic dale above the house, which was to be a mausoleum for his family.
Welton House was a substantial mansion and stood in grounds that had been laid out by the Williamson family ‘with such great taste and judgment’ in the later 18th century. There were plantations and rides and a prospect of the river Humber, with ‘innumerable boats’ passing by to enliven the view.
Above the house was a ‘highly picturesque glade, called Welton dale’, and it was on the high ground at the top of the dale that Raikes (1765-1837) placed his ‘small circular temple’. Raikes may have been inspired by the mausoleum his father had built in St Mary’s churchyard in Woodford, London (formerly Essex) in the last years of the eighteenth century, pictured below.
The mausoleum in Yorkshire was consecrated by the Archbishop of York, Edward Venables-Vernon-Harcourt, in August 1825, and Raikes offered the surrounding land to the village as a new burial ground, the churchyard being full. This does not seem to have been fully implemented, although there are graves of members of the Holden, Reynolds and Fitzgerald families, who had connections to the Raikes of Welton.
Sadly the name of the architect has not been recorded, but there is no mistaking the builder for a plaque above the door bears the words AEDIFICAVIT ROBERTUS RAIKES ARMIGER MDCCCXVIII (Built by Robert Raikes Esquire 1818). It is a lovely design with doric pilasters and elegant details include carved reliefs of sarcophagi on the blank bays.
John Allen, minister of the Presbyterian church in nearby South Cave, saw the interior and recorded the inscription on a tablet inside the mausoleum in his The Stranger’s Guide to Ferriby, Welton, Elloughton and South Cave published in 1841: ‘Within this Mausoleum are deposited the mortal remains of Robert Raikes, esq., of Welton House, who departed this life on the 20th day of August, 1837, aged 72 years’. This is the only recorded memorial inscription in the upstairs chamber, although Allen records that Raikes’ first wife and an infant son by his second marriage were also interred in the vault. It is difficult to be sure which members of the family were later laid to rest in the mausoleum: the parish records do not distinguish between burials in the churchyard and internments in the mausoleum. The three ‘beautiful stained glass’ windows seen by Allen are sadly long gone.
The mausoleum originally stood in a pretty little enclosure of shrubs. Within this was a round courtyard and the mausoleum was surrounded by a ‘stone wall and iron palisade’. The wall survives but the ironwork is lost.
The ‘deep, picturesque glen’ of Welton Dale became a ‘place of great resort’ for the inhabitants of Hull and its neighbourhood, and picture postcards show ladies in their Sunday best posing in the vale. Allen’s guide recommended the best places to pause and admire the views: these ‘stations’ included a rustic summerhouse, sadly long gone. Subsequent owners, the Harrison-Broadley family, continued to allow access as long as tourists obtained a pass from the farm bailiff in the village.
Not all of the visitors to the dale were content just to stroll and enjoy the scenery. In May 1914 local newspapers reported that thieves had ‘desecrated’ the mausoleum. Having failed to force the door to the mausoleum, they had instead prised up a stone slab to get into the vault. There they opened coffins in search of valuables and stripped lead from the caskets. As the ultimate indignity they propped up a coffin to provide a step to allow them to escape. The report was picked up across the nation with the Belfast Weekly News adding the subtitle ‘Shocking Story from Yorkshire’.
This was not the only attempt to gain entry to the mausoleum. In a 2004 oral history project, a local lady remembered sneaking in with her friends when ‘little lasses’ and finding the opened coffins. She recalled how they tucked the lead back around the coffin of a baby, but not everyone was so (relatively) respectful.
In 1960 two boys were cycling along when they spotted a skull atop a fencepost. One of the boys took it home and his family quickly made him take it to the police. Initially, the police thought it was from an ancient burial, and that is had been disturbed by work on a new road close to where the boys found the skull. The director of Hull Museums confirmed that this was not the case, and the Harrogate Forensic Science Laboratory found it to be a middle-aged female who had died in the nineteenth century. Eventually a youth confessed to entering the vault and taking the skull as a trophy, before panicking and abandoning it where the boys found it.
In 1967 another group of youths were found with a full skeleton propped up on the steps of the mausoleum. Concerned locals had been trying to locate relatives of the Raikes since the 1940s, and this latest desecration led to further attempts to track down descendants of those in the vault. The question of who should pay for the repairs vexed these family members, many of whom had long ago left the area, with one muttering in 1967 that his ancestors ‘should have made a trust fund to maintain it’.
Some of the descendants, reluctant to invest in a restoration, thought that the mausoleum should be ‘pulled down’, so there was action behind the scenes to secure the building a grade II listing in February 1968. With the assistance of the East Yorkshire Georgian Society, Major General Sir Geoffrey Raikes appointed the architectural practice of Francis Johnson & Partners of Bridlington to oversee work to repair the mausoleum and make the vault ‘vandal proof’.
Visiting some years ago, the Flâneuse was able to walk to the mausoleum, but given the history of vandalism it is understandable that the owners of the woodland have now tried to protect the building behind a barbed-wire fence. The mausoleum can however be seen from Wauldby Road (title image and below) and glimpsed from the lovely footpath through Welton Dale – but only if you visit before the trees are in full leaf and recent tree-planting matures.
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