She was the darling of the Jacobite uprising of 1715, when she braved an icy journey on horseback down to London, 'sprang' her brother Tom from prison just four days before his trial, and hid him in Blanchland before his escape to exile in France. Dorothy Forster is then said to have staged a fake funeral at Bamborough for her 'dead' brother, filling a coffin with sawdust for burial in the churchyard. And now the niece of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe is said to haunt the Lord Crewe Arms, forever awaiting her brother's return.
Very few facts are actually known about the woman herself or the legends that have grown around her, but prolific Victorian author Walter Besant must have thought the story had it all - romance, adventure, glamour - and he produced what he considered his best novel, Dorothy Forster in 1884, almost 170 years after Dorothy's acts of heroism.
It's a fanciful potboiler of a novel, a 'Mills and Boon' of its time, but nevertheless Besant's story gives some interesting insights into the Victorian view of Blanchland in the early 1700s - and perhaps some clues on how he imagined the landed classes regarded their minions in pre-Industiral Revolution England.
Here, in a passage where Dorothy describes Blanchland, Besant sets the scene by regaling readers with the 'old chestnut' of the monks in the mist...
To be sure, it was impossible to spend money at this quiet place, where there were no gentlemen to make matches, play cards, and lay bets, no market-town nearer than Hexham, no buying of horses, and no other people except ourselves and the hinds who tilled our lands.
There is certainly nowhere in England a place which lies so remote from human habitation, unless it be in Allendale or among the Cheviots, as this old ruined Tower of Blanchland.
DOROTHY FOSTER
